


Do automata dream of electric spaghetti?

by Mere_Mortifer



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Automaton Eddie Kaspbrak, Awkward Sexual Situations, Bickering, Blood Magic, Bottom Eddie Kaspbrak, Canon-Typical Violence, Doll Eddie Kaspbrak, Drunken Confessions, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak lives...in the sense that he comes to life, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier-centric, Explicit Sexual Content, First Kiss, First Time, Fluff, Gay Richie Tozier, Good Parents Maggie & Wentworth Tozier, Halloween, Halloween Costumes, Height Differences, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Idiots in Love, Illustrations, Internalized Homophobia, Love Confessions, M/M, Minor Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Minor Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Mutual Pining, Not Really Character Death, POV Eddie Kaspbrak, POV Richie Tozier, Pining Eddie Kaspbrak, Pining Richie Tozier, Post-IT (2017), Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie Tozier Needs a Hug, Richie Tozier is Whipped, Rituals, Sex happens only in the last chapter but there are explicit references to it throughout, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Smut, Steampunk, Strangers to Lovers, Temporary Character Death, The House on 28 Neibolt Street (IT), The Turtle (IT) CAN Help Us, Top Richie Tozier, Trapped In A Closet, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:54:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 14
Words: 89,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22309741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mere_Mortifer/pseuds/Mere_Mortifer
Summary: “Oh fuck,” Richie moans. “Please don’t let it be a dead body, I will so vomit.”But now that he can see it better, the stripe of skin that's peeking out of a sock is too smooth to be human, it reminds more of a—"Doll."The word leaves his lips with a not small dose of relief. He hooks a finger under the sheet that covers it and, keeping as far away from it as possible, he lifts it up and away.There's a boy underneath. Well, it's a doll, Richie wasn't wrong about that, but it looks like a boy, roughly Richie's age. The Uncanny Valley effect is difficult to ignore: the face of the doll is alarmingly realistic, and so are the brown locks of its hair and the proportions of the body. He keeps waiting for it to blink its eyes open.Richie waits. It doesn't blink.Until one day, itdoes.(Or: Richie is lonely, Eddie is an automaton rotting away in Neibolt House, and the Turtle decides to play matchmaker in a very unorthodox way.)
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 433
Kudos: 567
Collections: Rare Reddie Collections





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> The joy that using the Slow Burn tag for the first time gave me...unmeasurable.
> 
> I don't remember how the concept for this fic came to me, but now I've already written half of it so I guess it doesn't matter anymore. All you need to know is that IT and Maturin still exist, but Pennywise doesn't go around eating kids so the Losers have never met them before; all characters are aged up to seventeen/eighteen; Georgie is still dead but not for any supernatural reasons.
> 
> A BIG thank you to [rea_of_sunshine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rea_of_sunshine/pseuds/rea_of_sunshine/works) for encouraging me and for fixing some major plot holes in the story. Her suggestions gave life to some delicious angst later in the fic, and I've never been more excited to share something with the world before.
> 
> Title is a reference to "Do android dream of electric sheep?", but like, stupider than that. It makes me laugh every time that I read it so I don't wanna change it, and I think Richie would appreciate that logic.

__

_July 6th, 1993_

Richie kicks the same pebble down the road for the fifth time, reluctant to leave it behind. Seeing where it ends up is hard, what with the _stupid_ blur of tears clouding his eyes, but Richie’s nothing if not persistent.

He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him tonight. Or what has been wrong with him for the past few months, for that matter.

Not much has changed in the last year—he still sat next to Stan in math class and annoyed him the entire time with lewd drawings and bad jokes; he still caught every new movie at the Aladdin with Bill and Mike by his side. Beers shared in secret with Bev; study sessions where the only thing keeping him on track was Ben’s unfaltering patience; days spent hidden in the Barrens with all of them when the weather didn’t keep them bundled up in their homes.

But now summer has come, and Richie feels colder than in the dead of winter.

 _What’s wrong with me?_ he thinks, still dragging his feet on a deserted street on his way back home. Why is there this gloomy fog that makes every interaction with the Losers gray and muted, like he’s staring at a photo of good times long gone?

Maybe he’s just growing up. Maybe this is what _adulthood_ is—although Richie, at seventeen and counting, still sees himself as a kid. Not like Stan, who’s always been too mature for his own good; or Bill or Bev...well, that’s unfair. They were forced to grow up so quickly, it’s not like they asked for it.

A gust of cool breeze makes him shiver, and it’s enough to shake away the unpleasant thoughts for the moment. Richie looks at his surroundings to see where his legs brought him when he was too busy being a sad teenager to pay attention.

“Oh, fuck me,” he mutters as his eyes fall on the house.

Neibolt fucking street. He hates this place.

To be fair, almost the entirety of Derry would agree with him: there’s a reason no one lives here anymore. It just sucks.

The state of the asphalt under Richie’s feet sucks, how close it is to the noisy railway sucks—and oh, yeah, the abandoned, rotting, straight-out-of-a-horror-movie house _sucks_.

Passing through here during the day, riding on the back of Silver as Bill hollers louder than the trains speeding by, is not so bad. But he doesn’t make a habit of coming here at night, alone and on foot.

Whatever. Richie shot up seven inches in the past year—and although he hasn’t figured out yet what to do with limbs this long, most of his bullies thought it a good idea not to instigate fights with him anymore (well, with the notable exception of Bowers, but even he has calmed down considerably). If someone is lurking here ready to jump him and steal—let’s see, what does he have in his pocket?—two dollars and a pack of Sour Patch Kids he was saving for later, he can hold his ground. Maybe.  
Let’s not test that theory.

He starts to walk in earnest, looking up at the clear sky instead of the Edgar Allan Poe’s dream house on his right. It’s not long before his mind wanders back to the Losers again, and to how there isn’t something wrong in Richie's life, just something wrong with _Richie_ , which he’s been aware of since he was ten, thank you very much, but this is—

A shooting star cuts through the sky. Richie watches its bright tail fade out of sight.

Closing his eyes to make a wish is not a conscious decision—he just does it, and for a split second he’s eight again and lying with Stan of the roof outside his bedroom window, looking up at the stars and waiting to catch a falling one.

 _There’s a missing piece, somewhere_ , _I can feel it_ , he thinks. _I wish I could find it._

He opens his eyes. Nothing’s different. Well, duh, the hell did he think would happen?

Richie laughs at himself, and, still kicking the same pebble, makes his way back home.

⛦⛦⛦

It goes without saying that the shooting star doesn’t hear Richie’s wish—Richie had been too quiet, maybe, or the star was simply not paying much attention to what was going on light years under its trajectory.

But something else, from the depth of Neibolt, _was_ listening.

⛦⛦⛦

_July 8th, 1993_

“Earth to Richie, Earth to Richie. Are you okay?”

Richie doesn’t stop nervously chewing on his straw, but he does look up at Beverly. He slaps away the hand she’s waving in front of his eyes, but his heart is not into it. “Yeah, yeah, I’m good,” he assures her. “Just-”

“Distracted,” finishes Stan. He reappeared from inside the café just in time to catch the scene, his chocolate milkshake carefully held between two tissues. “And _quiet_. I never thought this day would come,” he deadpans.

“One day, Stanley,” says Richie as Beverly stifles a laugh in her Coke, “I’ll be gone and you’ll miss all the jokes I make about fucking your mom.”

Stan shrugs. “You never got much of a reaction from me anyway. I think I’ll survive.”

 _True_ , Richie thinks. _I can never get the rise out of him._ With his shirts buttoned up all the way to the neck and his perfectly styled curls, Stan has always been much too poised to give in Richie’s provocations. It can be disheartening sometimes, but Richie can’t deny that having his calming presence around does him good.

“Can you tell us what’s wrong with you today, though?” asks Bev. “Anything we can help with?”

Richie hesitates. He doesn’t know how to explain this simmering anxiety in the pit of his stomach, like he’s late for something but can’t remember what. Paired with his general moodiness and longing for who-knows-what, it’s been a rough couple of days to say the least.

And he keeps thinking of _Neibolt Street_ , for some reason. He even dreamt of going back last night, and although it wasn’t exactly a nightmare, it still didn’t make for a relaxing sleep. Hanging out with his friends distracted him for a while, but the hook in his mind that’s tugging his thoughts to the abandoned house is back in full force.

Richie angrily sucks the rest of his milkshake through the chewed-up straw. Why can’t he just be _normal_ for once?

Oh, what the hell. He has no reason to fight his own curiosity—and if he just _goes_ to Neibolt, chances are he’ll soon get bored and that’ll be the end of it.

“I’m just feeling restless, I guess,” he explains to Bev. “Pent up energy, you know? I think I’ll, uh, take a bike ride to clear my head. Listen to some rock songs and pretend I’m in the music videos, that could be cathartic.” He ruffles Stan’s hair as he rounds their table to get to his bike.

“ _Don’t_ listen to music, you won’t hear the cars and get run over,” Stan warns him.

“ _What?_ ,” Richie says, obnoxiously loud, as he pops in his earphones. “I can’t hear you! Bye, guys!” He straddles his bike and starts pedaling away, catching in the rear-view mirror on the handlebar both his friends flipping him off.

He does listen to Springsteen on his Walkman as he sprints through the streets of Derry, and even sings along when there’s no one around to hear how bad he is at it, but it’s not enough to quell the growing pit of anxiety in his stomach. The need to be near that house, right now, _right this second_ is scaring him. It’s like he forgot something there, something very important that he can’t afford to lose— _but what the fuck_ , Richie thinks, pedaling so fast his legs hurt, _I didn’t leave anything there the other day, there’s_ nothing _missing._

The thought doesn’t seem to calm him. By the time he gets to Neibolt the back of his shirt is soaked in sweat, and there’s a tremor to his limbs like the first time he downed an entire pot of coffee because Bill double-dog dared him to do it. The House, which earns its capital letter the moment Richie sets eyes on it and feels all the air rushing out of his lungs, stands in front of him. Rotting away under its own weight, beckoning Richie closer to the half-opened door.

There’s an energy surrounding it that has never been there before, or perhaps Richie has been blind to it up until now.

“It doesn’t feel _evil_ ,” he mutters to himself as he stuffs his Walkman in the back pocket of his jeans, and immediately feels stupid that he even entertained the idea. Houses can’t be _evil_. Right? God, he’s so stupid. Why didn’t he ask Bev and Stan to come with him? Why didn’t he take a day to round up the whole gang so they would all be here, the people that have never failed to make him feel stronger and protected?

Instead here he is, alone—and maybe it’s better this way, actually, because how the fuck could he explain to his friends the otherworldly presence in this street, felt but unseen like the static electricity before a storm?

“Fuck me, fuck me, this is so _stupid_ ,” he mumbles through clenched teeth as he walks up to the House. With a technique he’s well-versed in, Richie shuts down his brain and lets his mouth do all the hard work—he keeps talking to himself, switching from Voice to Voice as he sneaks in the front door and takes a couple of steps into the House. He dares a quick glance around.  
“Well, that ain’t so bad now, innit?” he says in the thick Irish accent of Officer Nell, one of the few impressions he’s gotten pretty decent at in the years.

Richie wouldn’t say that the place looks _good,_ either. Far from it, really: everything is covered in a thick layer of dust and dirt, and nothing _—_ the water-logged furniture, the wooden staircase, the lonely magazines molding away on the floor—looks intact enough to survive even a too-stern look from Richie. A gust of wind could knock this whole place down.

So what has kept it upright all these years?

Richie scrunches up his nose and shakes his head. Nevermind that, he doesn’t have time to think about the structural state of the building—he’s here for a reason. It’d be cool to know what that reason is, though.

His anxiety has quieted down considerably since he walked in, but the feeling of being pushed and tugged towards somewhere specific is still there—the best thing to do, he figures, is seeing where his feet lead him if he stops fighting back. Unsurprisingly, it gets him deeper into the House. Not on the second floor (thank God, he doesn’t think what’s left of the stairs could survive his weight), but around corners and through corridors, all well-lit by the natural sunlight, so that it only _vaguely_ reminds Richie of the haunted house he visited with Bill six years ago during the Summer Festival. He remembers being so scared he almost peed his pants. At least this time around he didn’t have to pay five dollars to get the same result.

The House is not that big, so soon he finds himself in what could have been the living room, and there, his feet stop. This must be the Right Place, whatever that entails. It’s more cluttered than the rest of the House; Richie walks through the same outdated decòr and the pervading smell of decay, gingerly tapping things with the tip of his Converse to scare away bugs or rats, but nothing stands out to him.

Until he sees a shoe.

This is not the first shoe he notices lying around, but it’s definitely the only one still being worn by a foot. A foot that’s attached to an ankle, that’s probably attached to the rest of a leg that Richie can’t see because there’s a worn-down sheet thrown over it. Over the rest of the...body?

“Oh fuck,” Richie moans. “Please don’t let it be a dead body, I will _so_ vomit.” He slowly makes his way closer to the bod— to the pers— to the _shoe_ with the conviction that if it starts moving he’ll run out of there so fast he’ll either break some records or a limb. _Weird,_ Richie thinks. Now that he can see it better, the stripe of skin that's peeking out of a sock is too smooth, without hair or even pores, to be a person, more like a

" _Doll_." The word leaves his lips with a not small dose of relief. The idea of a life-size doll hiding under that sheet is still creepy, but it doesn't hold a candle to a _dead body_.

Richie hooks a finger under the fabric and, keeping as far away from it as possible in case cockroaches come flying out or something, he lifts it up and away.

There's a boy underneath. Well, it's a doll, Richie wasn't wrong about that, but it _looks_ like a boy, roughly Richie's age. It's dressed in old-timey clothes, shorts and a jacket and a big floppy bow around the neck—from the Thirties, Richie would guess, although his only point of reference are the black and white movies from that era his dad likes to watch.

The doll is propped against an old chair, its arms hanging limply by its side—the right one seems to be almost detached from the rest of the torso. Despite that, and the missing panel on its neck that shows some sort of mechanism underneath, the sight of it sends shivers down Richie's spine. The Uncanny Valley effect of it all is difficult to ignore: the face of the doll (or is android a better term?) is alarmingly realistic, and so are the brown locks of its hair and the proportions of the body. He keeps waiting for it to blink.

Richie watches. It doesn't blink. It doesn't move at all.

"What the fuck am I supposed to do now?" he asks it. Him. Hard not to imagine it's just a sleeping boy instead of _whatever_ it actually is. "You're one creepy fucker, but I can't leave you here."

This must be what he was supposed to come back to Neibolt for, he's sure of it. All the anxiety that was building in Richie for two days has disappeared completely by now. Something or someone wanted him to come here, and find this doll and—and what?

Fix him?

He can't do that in here—hell, he couldn't do it _alone_ anyway.

"I hope you got more mechanical stuff lying under those school-boy clothes," Richie says as he kneels next to him. "Ben is gonna get a nerd boner for you. But I need to get you out of here first,"—he passes his arm under the doll's knees and around his torso—"so please don't lose pieces along the way. I wanna get the fuck out of this House ASAP."

After a bit of effort he manages to stand back up with the doll in his arms, and his head lolls from side to side until it falls on Richie's shoulder. Richie’s heartbeat picks up, and whether it's from some lingering adrenaline or because it’s the closest he's ever gotten to holding someone like this, he'd rather not know. Because the second option is just fucking _sad_.

"You're tiny but so heavy, Pinocchio," he grunts as he tries to maneuver them out of the room and towards the main door. It's a slow process—the doll's arm is about to come off, and he has no idea how fragile the rest of him is—but he eventually reaches his bike, waiting for him where he left it.

Okay, so what now? He can't leave his bike here, and he can't walk around with what could pass off as the dead body of a time traveler from the Thirties in his arms.

Richie's eyes fall on the elastic rope he keeps wrapped around the back carrier of the bike. He has to make it work.

"I'm gonna be honest with you," he says as he carefully lowers the doll to the ground, his back supported by a tree, "I'm really close to freaking out. I slept like shit for two days, I feel like there's _something_ lurking in this street and—and, I'm talking to a life-size _doll_. How much more can I take for today?"

He finishes unwrapping the rope and turns to look at his not-so-lively companion. His eyelids have slid halfway up at some point revealing brown irises as realistic as the rest of him, and now he looks, unblinking, somewhere behind Richie's shoulder. He looks unimpressed.

"Yeah, you got it right," says Richie. " _Not_ much more."

It takes a while, but he manages to prop the doll on the back carrier, even though he goes through the entire list of English swear words before he's done with it. Richie secures him to his body with the rope and starts pedaling away from Neibolt Street, voting not to go back there for the rest of his fucking life.

He takes a shortcut back to his house, praying that no one sees him.

And then he immediately changes direction to go to Bill's, because he cannot deal with this alone for one more second, and _oh my God what the fuck_ is _this thing strapped to my back, anyway?_

The sun is setting by the time he gets to Bill's house—he hadn’t realized how long his solo escapade in Neibolt had taken. He'll have to call his mom and tell her he's not dead in a ditch before she gets too worried about him.  
He sneaks into Bill's backyard and goes through the hassle of getting both himself and the doll safe off the bike. That done, he starts throwing increasingly bigger pebbles at Bill's bedroom window, hoping that 1) he is actually home and 2) he doesn't end up breaking the glass he does _not_ have the money to pay for.

Richie could actually cry when Bill's bangs appear, followed shortly by the rest of his overly-serious face.

He squints down at him, looking confused. "Richie?"

"Bill! Thank fuck you're home."

Richie can pinpoint the exact second Bill notices what’s propped against the bike, half-hidden behind him. His eyes go so wide Richie can see the white ring of the sclerae even in the dimming light. "Wuuu-who the hell is _t-that_?"

"I wish I knew,” Richie sighs. “I mean, it's a _what_ , but it looks like a _who_ and—Bill. Bill. I'm kind of freaking out."

"Yeah, I c-can see that. You're kind of fre-freaking me out as well. Just w-wait a second."

Bill’s face disappears from the window, and if Richie strains his ears enough he can hear him going down the stairs. Few moments later he comes running in the garden from the back door, his socked feet almost slipping on the dewy grass. He stops dead when he’s in front of the doll. “Ta-dah,” says Richie, quite lamely. He even does jazz hands.

Bill’s face reddens as he tries to get the words out. “Cuh-care to eh-eh-explain?”

His stutter had gotten better a few years ago, thanks to weekly speech therapy lessons and a lot of effort on Bill’s part, but all progress has gone lost after what happened to Georgie.

“I, uh, stole a creepy looking doll from the House on Neibolt Street.”

“ _Why?_ ”

“Because he looked really lonely and it was making me sad.”

“J-je-sus Christ, T-Trashmouth,” moans Bill in what Richie’s come to recognize as his _I can’t believe these are my friends_ tone of voice. The effect is somewhat ruined by how fascinated he looks with the doll, even ignoring how wet his socks are getting for the sake of examining it better. “D-did you say _he_ luh-looked lonely?”

Richie feels the back of his neck go hot. “Well, it’s, you know-” _Get a grip, Tozier._ He has no reason to get flustered, and he’d like his body to get the memo, _thank you._ “He looks like a boy, feels weird calling him an _it_.”

Bill lets out an incredulous laugh. “Oh, th-that’s what’s we-weird about this? Cuh-come on, help me bring your boy in t-t-the garage.”

 _Your boy._ He thinks back to how his head rested on the hollow of Richie’s neck when he brought him out of the House.

 _What the fuck!_ he screams in his head as they carefully pick up the doll, _I’m_ not _getting a crush on an inanimate object just because it looks…_ He glances at the porcelain face staring up at the sky. It’s damaged, and dirty, and the paint is all faded, but the main features are still discernible. The delicately arched nose, the upturned line of the eyes. Pretty—and sad, he wasn’t lying to Bill about that: there’s something undeniably miserable about him, and not just because of the state he’s in. The doll must have had the same dejected expression even when it was fresh new, like he had been somehow aware of his lack of control over his life.

 _Same here, buddy,_ Richie thinks fondly. And yeah, maybe he _really_ likes this doll already, but it’s just—artistic appreciation. Totally normal.

Inside the garage, they stumble in the dark until the doll is safely laid on Mr. Denbrough’s work table. As Bill turns on the light, Richie moves some tools around to make more space. “You sure your dad won’t mind?” he asks.

Bill huffs a laugh, sounding more resigned than amused. “I’ll be suh-surprised if he even n-notices.”

Richie bites his lip, embarrassed. He shouldn’t have asked, he knows very well that Bill’s parents haven’t been all the way here since George died.

“S-so what n-now?”

Richie fixes his glasses up his nose. “I dunno. We call the others?”

⛦⛦⛦

"This is _so_ cool! Where did you get this, Richie?"

Richie laughs, softly punching Ben's shoulder. "I knew you'd get all excited over this, Haystack. Gonna write any poems about it?"

He hears both Mike and Bill laugh at the joke, although he's too busy getting a noogie from Ben to really appreciate it. He's shot up at least five inches from the start of the year, and he's now as tall as Richie, and way _stronger_ , the fucker. He's been putting a lot of work into losing weight, fueled by the Loser's encouragement and his own spite towards his asshole P.E. teacher—he's really growing into his looks, as Bev would say, and Richie has no problem picturing a future where he's, like, a handsome soccer player or something.

"Beep beep, Richie," Bev says. Is she blushing or is it a trick of the light? "So is this what you did when you went to 'clear your head' today? You found this thing?"

"Oh, i-it's a _him_ , Bev," teases Bill.

"Shut the fuck up, Denbrough." He manages to get free of Ben's grip, and hops on the table next to the doll. "I mean, I didn't know I was gonna find our Sleeping Pinocchio," he explains, picking at some of the strings in his holey jeans. "I felt this—uh, need to go back to Neibolt Street. To the abandoned House, you know? And when I got inside I found him.”

Mike stops studying the doll's hands to frown at him. "What do you mean you needed to be in Neibolt? That place is creepy."

"It _was_ really freaky," he agrees, and explains everything to his friends as best as he can. About the dreams, about the mounting restlessness that made him act so weird the last two days. He tries to describe the alien presence he felt all around him in Neibolt, and although he trips over his words and he definitely doesn't do justice to what he lived through, the Losers seem to get him. Mike especially looks very intrigued, and Richie wouldn't be surprised if the only thing keeping him from running to the library to do some research is the fact that it's closed.

Richie notices that Stan has wondered closer to the table only when he's done recounting his afternoon. "It's a not a doll,' he says.

"What?"

"You keep calling it—him, a doll." With his well manicured fingers, Stan undoes the rusty buttons of the not-a-doll’s jacket. The fabric falls open, and there's a chorus of _ooh's_ and _ahh's_ when the complex system of gears underneath is revealed. "It's an _automaton_."

"Holy shit," whispers Ben, “like one from the 1800’s? I know that they used them to ring the bells of churches in, like, France. But this one’s way cooler than those automata!” He looks so excited that Richie would totally make a joke about him creaming his pants if he wasn't so busy marveling at the—the _automaton_ 's, apparently, chest.

It's...really damaged. It breaks his heart, and Richie knows it's ridiculous to already care so much, but he can't do anything to stop it. After all, he’s the same boy who used to cry about his stuffed animals drowning in the washing machine when his mom forced him to wash them.

The mechanism is visible through the rusted metal that lay under the automaton's clothes, both where his creator intended—there are intricate designs deliberately cut away that must have looked like roses once upon a time—and where the passage of time has taken over. Beverly reaches out and undoes the big bow wrapped around his neck, careful like she's scared the head will simply roll off the table once it's gone. It doesn't. It reveals how it's attached to the rest of the body, the elegant mess of gears and metal tendons—and it's beautiful, or grotesque, Richie has yet to decide, how masterfully shaped and painted the automaton's face is compared to what stayed hidden by fabric.

"Do you think we can fix him?" he asks. It's only after the words have left his mouth that he realizes how fervently he wants them to say yes.

Bill wraps an arm around his shoulders. "We'll d-do our best, Rich," he promises. _He takes the leader role so gracefully_ , Richie thinks, _he always has_. "Right guys?"

Beverly smiles and winks at him. "Fuck yeah we will."

Ben and Stan respond distractedly, but it's because they're too busy pointing at the mechanism and trying to guess every piece’s function, so Richie can't complain.  
Meanwhile, Mike is still studying the automaton's face. "We can definitely try," he agrees. "I think I saw something similar to this before. I'll let you guys know if I remember where."

Richie feels more at ease in his skin than he has in months. He loves moments like this, where the Losers work together like a well-oiled machine—there's this sense of belonging that he's missed like a phantom limb, and if he's right this project will keep them busy for a couple of weeks minimum.

Maybe this summer won't be so bad after all.

"You guys look like Christmas came early," he snickers, because God forbid the moment turns too _genuine_ for class clown Tozier. "I bring you what would be considered _homework_ by some and you all get _so_ invested. Bunch of nerds."

Stan flips him off without even making the effort of looking up. Best friend material through and through.

It’s well past dinner time, and they make the unanimous decision to start working the next day. Richie is reluctant to leave the automaton behind at Bill’s—there’s something about the way he lays on the table, gutted like a corpse mid-autopsy, that doesn’t sit right with him. But when he talked to his mom on Bill’s landline she made him promise that he would be back before ten p.m., and so he has to go.

Stan, ever the pragmatic, as he mounts his bike tells him to “Relax, Richie. You’re leaving your boy in safe hands. Bill and Mike are already looking for tools we could use to fix it—well, at least try to.” The road to Mike’s farm is not that pleasant at night, and with Bowers not only hating his guts, but also being his _neighbor_ , he accepted Bill’s offer to stay for the night.

They both looked pretty happy about it. It’s nice to see Bill smile—he hasn’t done that much since Georgie.

Stan and Richie say bye to them, and to Bev and Ben who have to go in the opposite direction, and they make their way home side by side.

The night is warm but not suffocating, and Richie for once enjoys a moment of silence without feeling the need to break it. He lets the breeze tangle knots in his too-long hair, and thinks of the Jules Verne books his dad used to read him when he was a kid, of how the automaton could easily fit in one of those stories. Ugh, fuck, he needs to give him a name—‘automaton’ is a mouthful, and he refuses to even think of him as _his boy,_ like Stan and Bill called him, because that’s. That’s just embarrassing, and—and _wrong_. It sort of makes his skin crawl, although admitting it would be more revealing than just keeping silent.

Stan’s voice snaps him out of his thoughts. “Richie?” He sounds worried.

“Mh?”

“I—,” he starts, but hesitates. For a long second, only the gentle breeze and the squeaking of Richie’s bike fill the air. “The thing you said about a presence guiding you to Neibolt—that wasn’t a bit, right?”

“I swear it wasn’t. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Stan sighs, like he was hoping for a different answer but he’s not surprised this is the one he got. “Yeah, I thought so.” His house comes into view, a few streets away from Richie’s, and they both stop in front of it. “See you tomorrow.”

“Wait—you sure you’re okay, man? I’m freaked out, too, but nothing about Neibolt felt dangerous or evil. Just weird.”

Stan smiles ruefully. “I’m not a big fan of weird.”

“Yeah, ‘cause deep down you’re an old man. You even dress like one.”

The tension breaks, and Richie cackles way too loudly, sprinting away to avoid the pebbles from the roadside Stan’s throwing his way. “See you tomorrow!” he yells when he’s sure Stan can barely hear him.

He makes his way back home, feeling more content than in a long while, and he falls asleep the second his head touches the pillow. He dreams of turtles, of a sepia colored world that smells of buttery popcorn, of a well so deep he can’t see the water sloshing at the bottom—but come morning it all vanishes from his mind, and Richie never thinks anything of it again.

⛦⛦⛦

The Losers meet again the day after. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Two weeks pass as they clean and fix the automaton in Bill's garage, with Richie's portable radio playing the Top Forty in the background. The books Ben took from the library are piled everywhere, and they get consulted every few minutes—photography books about the French automata in the late 1800’s, others that teach them how to clean rust off metal or how to carve replacement pieces from wood and _goddamnit, Richie, don’t touch the pages when your hands are covered in grease_.

In the panic of one afternoon where Mr. Denbrough gets curious about what they’re all doing in his garage, they hastily move everything they might need in Bev’s (well, her aunt’s) car and then, _c-c-carefully, guys_ , the automaton himself. Bev drives them to Ben’s house, where his mom gives them the blessing to do _whatever it is you kids are doing_ in the shed in the back. They spend all day together, and between singing badly along to Whitney Houston’s _I will always love you_ (which plays on the radio roughly every ten minutes, or so it feels like to Richie) and eating sandwiches for practically every meal, they manage to do some progress. A lot of progress, actually.

Stan, to everyone’s amusement but Richie's, keeps calling the automaton _his boy_ —while Richie cycles endlessly through the same bunch of nicknames, mostly Pinocchio and Mr. Roboto.  
One day, however, Mike arrives at Ben’s house with a glint in his eyes and an old leather album in his hands. “ _Guys_ ,” he exclaims, his enthusiasm radiating off of him, “you remember I told you something about our patient over here looking familiar?”  
“You found something?” Richie asks, quickly cleaning the dirt off his glasses to see better whatever Mike has to show them. “A photograph?”  
“Yes! It’s him, I’m sure— _look_.” He opens the album on the first clean surface he finds, and they all crowd around him. Mike points to a faded photo of what looks like a circus, and sure enough there is Richi- _their_ automaton sitting behind a desk with a mustached man proudly presenting him. There’s a sign attached to the booth, and only one word painted on it in a flowery cursive.  
“ _Edward_ ,” reads Richie, and if his voice is weak with some unknown emotion, the others have the decency not to mention it.

“It suits him,” comments Ben.  
Richie decides to ignore the fondness pooling in his stomach at the sight of Edward, who he has only seen in various states of damage and distress, looking brand new and startlingly realistic in the picture. “It does _not_ suit him, Haystack,” he scoffs. “What is he, a middle-aged risk analysist? A middle-aged _urologist_?”  
“Why does he have to be middle-aged?”  
“Because that’s the name of a middle-aged man!”  
“I can’t wait to see how well ‘Richie’ suits you when _you_ ’re a middle-aged man, Trashmouth,” chimes in Stan.  
“I’ll just go by Dick instead, Stanley _Urin._ ”  
Stan shrugs, pretending to clean his perfectly trimmed nails. “Oh, I call you a dick already, just not when you can hear me.” Bill and Mike laugh at that, leaning against each other, and Richie would smack them both if his arms were long enough to reach them.  
“No, no, guys, I’m with Richie this time,” says Bev, giggling as well. “He’s too _cute_ to be called Edward, look how adorable he is!”  
"So wh-what n-name should we use?” asks Bill, and Richie can’t help but notice how he’s still firmly in Mike’s personal space. Mike doesn’t seem to mind.  
“If I have to say ‘automaton’ one more time, I swear to _God_ ,” groans Ben, and the sentiment is echoed by the rest of the group.  
“Something simple, then.”  
“No s-s-shit, Sherlock, but wh-what?”

“ _Eddie_ ,” says Richie, like there are no other alternatives. “Cute and short like him.” He keeps his voice purposefully dreamy to the point of ridicule, trying to hide in plain sight that he’s not joking at all.  
_Cute, cute, cute—_ now that Bev has said it he can’t help but agree, and he wishes he could state it as freely as she had. He wishes the illusion hadn’t been ruined from the start, and that the boy who looks so real and so _alive_ in that old black and white photo was sitting on the table next to him, instead of the broken shell they’ve been trying so hard to put back together.

“Eddie,” echoes Stan, as if to taste the word on his tongue. “I like it.”  
The others agree. And so it sticks.

 _Do_ you _like it?_ Richie thinks at Eddie, watching with immeasurable sadness his brown eyes stare, unfocused, back at him. It sends a shiver down his spine, the way his gaze passes through Richie as if he doesn’t notice him —as if, through the filter of the decades separating their existence, Richie’s but a speck of dust, or just the next someone in a long line of someones who’ll eventually leave him to rot, alone and in the dark.

⛦⛦⛦

Richie huffs a frustrated sigh, and sinks both hands—they’re all dirty, he shouldn’t, but it’s not like he doesn’t badly need a shower anyway—in his hair. His back pops when he stretches, and he has a quick glance into what life as a seventy year old man will be like.  
“Richie, I’m gonna go to bed,” says Ben from somewhere behind his shoulder. They’re the only two there: the others have all left a couple of hours ago. “Man, I’m beat. You can stay if you want, just lock the door when you leave.”  
“Alright, Haystack. Go get your beauty sleep, I’ll stay a while longer.”  
Ben mumbles a _goodnight_ mid-yawn and leaves him by himself.

It’s dark outside, if refreshingly cooler than the torrid late July day, but the neons that light up the shed are a strain on Richie’s eyes. He’s been blinking like an owl for the better part of the night—he should follow Ben’s example and go home, but he can’t give up yet. It’s been, what...four days since Mike showed them the photo? They’ve officially finished fixing Eddie as best as they could—the patchwork of wood and clean metal and new gears the constitutes his chest his hidden safely under his (clean, but not new) clothes. Bev has made an amazing job of repainting Eddie’s face where it was faded and chipped, using the colors her aunts bought her for her last birthday. She even added freckles all over his cheeks and nose, _because why not?_ she has explained. Richie’s counted them a couple of times already. There are exactly thirty seven.

 _And all of that is wonderful_ , reasons Richie, feeling bitter and blaming it on his tiredness, _what a bonding experience this has been, truly incredible, yadda yadda—but why can’t we activate him?_

He’s been reading about automata for the better part of a month, by now, they all have. Automata are supposed to move, perform some sort of _action_ , so there must be something still wrong with Eddie’s mechanism if he’s still, you know, _not doing that._ He’s raided the library looking for something, _anything_ that could help him fix him, to no avail. Richie’s looked at the only photo of Eddie they have so many times, searching for clues, that he’s surprised he hasn’t burned a hole through it. Mike found out it’s one of many from summer 1935, when a circus passed through Derry and all the performers posed for the local newspaper— and that’s about all they know of Eddie’s origins. That, and that his creator was someone called Frank Kaspbrak, if the signature on the back of the photo is to be believed.

Nothing on how to activate him. Richie’s starting to think that being a bunch of teenagers trying their best will not be enough to get them to the finish line this time.

“Goddamnit, Eddie,” he whispers. He’s hunched over, their faces so close he would be able to feel Eddie’s breath—if he had any. “You gotta meet me halfway, buddy. I don’t know what else to do.” Richie moves a chair near to the table, and he sits as close to Eddie as possible. He rests his head on the table next to his, looking through tired eyes at Eddie’s delicate profile—the sweep of his nose, his synthetic eyelashes casting a shadow on his cheekbones.  
“You’re really fucking cute, Eds,” Richie says, and before he knows it he’s fallen asleep.

__

⛦⛦⛦

_July 27th, 1993_

The bright light of the morning wakes Richie up—that, and whoever is softly tapping on his head. “Fuck,” he slurs, feeling all at once the pain of sleeping on a chair in the humid summer air. “Ben? _Shit_ , I fell asleep last night.”

“My name is not Ben.”  
It’s clearly not Ben’s voice. It’s not the voice of any of the Losers—or anyone Richie’s ever met, for that matter. It is, if Richie had to guess, the voice of whoever is still tapping a finger on his temple, and _holy shit who the fuck—_ He stands up so fast he almost gets whiplash, and he promptly falls back on the chair when his brain processes the sight in front of him.  
“Uh, hello?” says Eddie.

Because the _whoever_ is Eddie. Eddie who sat up straight sometime before he woke up Richie, Eddie who's currently blinking those long lashes of his—like that's a thing he's always been able to do.

 _You couldn't do that last night_ , Richie tries to say. _What the fuck! What the actual fuck!_ What comes out instead is a pitiful moan he's glad no else is there to hear (you know, apart from Eddie, who was just a few hours ago an _inanimate object_.)

Richie tries to go back to when he was ten years old and nothing could faze him, when Santa and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy made perfect sense and were as easy to believe in as the sun rising every day. "You're alive?" he manages to ask.  
Eddie blinks again, stiffly moving his arms in front of his eyes as if to check they're still there. "I am?" he responds.  
"Uh uh."  
"Interesting. How?"  
Richie shrugs. "I don't know. Listen, I think—I think I'm gonna vomit. Is that okay?" Eddie scrunches up his nose, or does his best approximation of it considering his face is made of porcelain and a layer of silicone skin.  
"I'd rather you didn't. From what I've heard, it's quite unsanitary."

Richie does it anyway, in the bin full of sandwich wrappers and wood chippings near the door.

"Oh, yes," comments Eddie (because he can do that now! What the fuck!), "that _does_ look unsanitary. Mrs. Kaspbrak was right."

That is, for some reason, the funniest thing Richie's ever heard in his life, and he laughs at it for a good five minutes. Maybe it's just the adrenaline. Maybe it's the fact that despite the absurdity of it, and that he must still be dreaming and will soon wake up to a liveless Eddie laying limp near him, Richie's still ridiculously, unbelievably happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Fanart](https://scrunchi.tumblr.com/post/625970936461639680/fanart-for-mere-mortifer-s-fanfiction-do) by @scrunchi on Tumblr | [Alternative link](https://archive.org/details/dadoes-artwork-by-scrunchi-first-chapter)


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie doesn't know if he likes this _sentience_ business.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry to whoever read the first chapter before I realized the spacing got fucked up and the dialogue was all on the same line. Consider this my formal apology.

Edward observes the dark-haired boy laugh maniacally in the corner of the room, where he’s still hunched over a trash can. 

It’s a novel feeling, being able to watch something on his own volition. Well, truth to be told, the concept of _feeling_ itself is novel for Edward—he has yet to decide if he enjoys it, this sentience business. Considering that the very first experience it has brought him is seeing someone retch and feeling nauseated despite the absence of a stomach, all signs point to _no_. Life as an inanimate object seemed much more pleasant. 

He thinks of awed audiences watching him in rapt attention. He thinks of Dr. Kaspbrak cleaning and oiling his moving parts every evening; of Mrs. Kaspbrak sewing new clothes for him and petting his hair like he could somehow feel her affections. And then he thinks of the day they disappeared, leaving him in the hands of people who didn’t know nor care what to do with him; of long stretches of time spent in closed boxes, or wrapped in old sheets, or alone in a house with rain and frost eating away at him.  
Perhaps that life wasn’t _so_ great either. 

The boy’s laugh quiets down and he stands up, still looking vaguely unhinged behind his thick-rimmed glasses. He’s looking at Edward with wide, watering eyes, like he’s afraid he will miss some vital information if he blinks.  
“So, am I, like, going insane?” he asks.  
“It looks like it, yes,” agrees Edward.  
The boy breathes out a soft, incredulous _ah!_ , and takes a few steps closer to him.  
 _Walking_ —now _that_ ’s something Edward would like to try, after however many decades of sitting behind desks or crammed in too-small spaces.  
“I was halfway there already,” comments the boy, “so I’m not surprised. But, uh—that does mean you’re not...am I hallucinating right now?”  
Edward hums—with which vocal cords, he doesn’t know, since Dr. Kaspbrak never gave him any. “You are not,” he reassures him. “I am alive, somehow, and I seem to understand that we are both equally confused about it.”  
The boy shows his slightly irregular row of teeth in a smile so wide it must be painful. His eyes are still suspiciously wet. “Oh my fucking God, you talk like a good little scholar. That’s adorable, what the fuck.”  
“And you swear like a sailor, but I have the decency not to comment on it.”  
“You just did, dumbass.”  
Edward frowns—at least, he tries to. He doesn’t exactly have the facial muscles for it, but the thought is there. “ _Also_ , you are dressed strangely. Are obnoxious colors a new fashion trend or is it you, specifically, that has bad taste?”  
“I’m not taking constructive criticism from someone with striped knee-high socks.”

It’s curious, how arguing seems to be calming the boy down as much as it’s firing up Edward.  
The pumps and levers in his arms creak angrily as he gesticulates, unconsciously mimicking the way his creator used to talk with his hands. The emotions traveling through his body—rolling between the gears in his chest, settling somewhere behind the glass orbs of his eyes—are unfamiliar and hard to unravel.  
They’re not unpleasant, though. Edward finds himself enjoying the back and forth, and hopes the strange boy does as well. 

“I couldn’t exactly pick my clothes, you know?” he argues. He tries moving his legs, and against all hope they respond to his commands: he shifts one the table, and lets them dangle off the edge in an uneven rhythm. “Help me stand up, will you? I want to see if I can walk, it looks fun.”  
“Does it?” asks the boy. His black curl falls on his eyes as he looks down at him, less panicked than before but still dazed.  
 _He’s tall_ , notices Edward. _Taller than Dr. Kaspbrak was, definitely taller than me._ _  
_“Why don’t _you_ tell me, dimwit? I’ve never taken a single step in my life.”  
“Holy shit,” they boy laughs softly, “ _dimwit._ That’s so cute, Eddie.” His hands are shaking when he settles them on Edward’s elbows to help him off the table.  
“Eddie?” he echoes. He doesn’t remember ever being called anything but his full name.  
“Uh, yeah. You don’t like it?”  
He thinks it over a moment. “No, I think—It’s nice.” 

When the tip of his shoes touch the ground, he leans heavily on the boy’s chest. He knows, in that second, what fear feels like: he’s terrified that his legs will give in, of hitting the floor and breaking in thousands of pieces no one will bother to put back together. “You can call me Eddie,” he mumbles to distract himself. “What’s your name?”  
“Richie Tozier, at your service,” he answers in a weird accent Eddie vaguely recognizes as British. With his face still pressed on Richie’s chest, he feels more than hear the rumble of his voice through the layers of both real and artificial skin. “So can I let you go, or-”  
“No!” Eddie exclaims. He can’t stand on his own, he’s not even supposed to walk, his legs are _decorative—_ and Mrs. Kaspbrak was always so worried that he would break, or get damaged beyond repair, because _he’s fragile, Frank, don’t you know he’s fragile? You must be careful, he looks so much like_ him _-_ _  
_“No, please,” he says again, embarrassed at his reaction. Is this what embarrassment feels like? He doesn’t like it.

Richie’s hands slide from his arm down to his waist, digging in the fabric of Eddie’s worn-down jacket. “Alright, jeez, no need to freak out,” he says. “It’s _my_ turn to freak out, ‘cause a robot came to life and he’s probably gonna kill us all. Are you gonna kill us all, Eddie?”  
“I’m considering it.”  
“God, you’ve been alive for ten minutes and you’re already funnier than me. That’s fucking stupid. Hey, are we slow dancing right now? I can put on some music.”  
“Do you mind if I ignore you for a while?” Eddie says. “You’re making no sense.”  
He tries to take a deep breath for courage before remembering he doesn’t have lungs. Above him, Richie laughs but keeps his grip steady on his waist, and Eddie finally takes a couple of steps forward on rigid legs. The metal levers that make up his knees protest, but he doesn’t go tumbling to the ground.  
“You’ll be good friends with Stan, then, he also likes to ignore me,” Richie tells him. Eddie’s momentarily surprised, another emotion to add to his ever-growing list: he hadn’t even considered that a whole world still existed outside of the shed, and other people to fill it with. “Oh God, I can’t wait for my friends to see you. Ben will start crying for sure.”

And so Eddie discovers a key element of Richie’s personality: he talks. A lot. 

He doesn’t let a second pass in silence as Eddie takes slow, unsteady steps, trying to make the mechanisms inside his legs familiar with the process of putting one foot in front of the other. He chimes in Richie’s endless monologue from time to time—when he can understand what he’s going on about, that is, because in whatever year this is people speak very differently than he’s used to. Mostly he lets him ramble on as background noise, pleasant enough to listen to that Eddie forgets what he’s supposed be scared of.  
Before he knows it he’s walking by himself, Richie’s hand clutched in his stiff, silicone-covered one more out of moral support than necessity. 

“Fuck yeah, Pinocchio! You’re doing it, you’re walking like a Real Boy,” laughs Richie. “Hey, hey, Eddie—do you wanna go give Ben a heart attack?”  
Eddie found out minutes ago that his mouth is the only really movable part of his face, and he puts that knowledge to good use to show Richie his confusion with a frown. “A heart attack? Do you want to _kill_ your friend?”  
“Jesus, not _literally._ Come on, pretty please, Ben will love you— and I need someone else to see you because I’m still not sure I’m not tripping on acid.”  
“Tripping on _what_ ?”  
Richie huffs, and smiles, and grasps his hand tighter. Eddie can’t feel the touch like he knows a human would, but the sense of pressure is still pleasant. “I think it’s too early to introduce you to drugs. Come on, come on, just trust me.”

Eddie gives in—not that he had any reason to resist. He can admit that Richie’s first reaction to seeing him move and talk was...funny. At least what Eddie imagines _funny_ is. He wouldn’t mind replicating the experience with someone else.  
Richie opens the door of the shed onto a world painted in the greens and blues of an early morning, and Eddie lets his enthusiasm make him brave enough to follow him outside. 

⛦⛦⛦ 

“Okay, he’s still sleeping. Go wake him up,” whispers Richie. 

He’s spying inside Ben’s room through a gap in the room, his teeth sinking in his bottom lip to keep in nervous giggles.  
Eddie stands close to him and keeps busy by touching the hallway’s wallpaper—he can’t feel the smoothness of it, nor the temperature. It doesn’t come as a surprise: his fingers _do_ lack the nerve endings necessary for it.  
“Why do _I_ have to wake him up?” he asks.  
“So you’ll be the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes! _So romantic_.”  
“And you want to see if he will vomit like you did.”  
Richie hides his snickering behind a closed fist. “You’ve got me all figured out, Detective,” he says in a nasally, mid-Atlantic accent. It brings back memories of evenings spent under the hands and tools of Dr. Kaspbrak as radio shows played in the background—Eddie can almost hear the static crackle over Richie’s voice.  
“Let me get in the room, then,” he relents. “I’ll do it.”

Sneaking in Ben’s bedroom is as easy as sneaking into his house: Richie knew where he kept a second key for the back door, and Ben’s mother—who was lounging on a kitchen chair, reading a newspaper with her back turned to the intruders—didn’t hear them at all. The entire time he was walking up the stairs to the second floor, Eddie was worried one of his joints would creak loudly and give them away.  
The worst has passed, though: he’s already in Ben’s room, watching a nest of chestnut hair softly snore on a pillow.

Richie’s behind him, tall enough enough to comfortably rest his chin on the top of Eddie's head. “Oh, do what you did to me,” he’s saying excitedly, “tap his head. Even better, put a finger in his mouth and wait for him to notice.”  
Eddie would elbow him in the stomach, but that would make Richie pull away—and he enjoys all the points of pressure where their bodies are touching. “I will not do such thing, you fopdoodle.”  
“The fuck does _that_ mean?”  
“Uh, Ben?” Eddie calls, ignoring him. “Richie wants me to rudely wake you up. You need better friends.”  
Ben hums in his sleep, snuggling closer to his pillow. _Isn’t he adorable?_ , whispers Richie in his ear as Eddie lays a hand on the sleeping boy’s shoulder—he shakes softly at first, and then less so when Ben gives no signs of waking up.  
Finally, he opens one sleep-clouded eye. 

Ben looks at the hand clutching his shoulder, which must appear human enough to him not to cause too much alarm, but then his gaze travels up Eddie’s arm and lands on his face, where Eddie hopes he finds a reassuring smile.  
Eddie doesn’t know how to smile reassuringly—that much is obvious, since Ben starts screaming. 

Eddie’s first instinct (and isn’t it curious that he has _instincts_ to begin with) is to press his hands to Ben’s mouth in an attempt to muffle his voice.  
“Oh, fuck! The machine rebels, it’s trying to suffocate him!” exclaims Richie from somewhere behind him, although he doesn’t sound worried at all.  
“Richie, that is _not_ helpful.”  
“You’re murdering my friend, I don’t want to be helpful!”  
That must scare Ben even more, because he grasps at Eddie’s hands to get free, despite the fact that he obviously _isn’t_ trying to suffocate anyone and _this is all your fault anyway, Richie, you told me to wake him!_

Two arms tug him away from the bed when Ben starts kicking, and Eddie goes crashing back on Richie’s chest, where he is held safely out of the way. He feels relief wash through his mechanisms like lubricant oil—Eddie knows he could break easily, and one well-placed hit from Ben would be enough. From what he can see of his form still hidden under the sheets, he’s as tall as Richie but way less lanky.

Or maybe Richie’s just using his body as a shield, who knows?

“What the fu-oh my God, Rich, what the hell,” Ben pants. He’s stopped screaming, but he still looks terrified—which, fair enough, Eddie is not offended. 

“Benny? Are you okay? I heard you scream.” It’s a female voice, coming from downstairs. Ben’s mother.  
Ben hesitates, his eyes switching wildly from Eddie’s face to Richie’s. “I am...okay?” he yells in the direction of the door, although it comes off more as a question than a statement. He must find some encouragement in Richie’s eyes, because he gradually calms down. “I, uh, fell off the bed, but I’m fine.”  
He’s convincing enough for his mother: faint footsteps tell Eddie that she’s walking away and not upstairs. 

“I should probably do some official introductions,” says Richie in the following moment of silence. “Eddie, this is my dear friend Benjamin Hanscom—and Ben, this is Eddie. You already know him ‘cause I remember that you lovingly brushed his hair and called him a ‘ _miracle of engineering'_ just last week.”  
Eddie waves, the levers in his wrist smoothly allowing the action. “It’s nice to meet you, Ben. I promise I _wasn’t_ trying to suffocate you.”  
It felt important to say out loud. Ben looks reassured. “I believe you. I _did_ call you a miracle of engineering, though. Uh, sorry?”  
“No, no, I appreciate it.”  
“And I did brush your hair.”  
“I appreciate that as well.”  
They both fall silent. Richie groans and lets himself fall on a bright red chair near the only desk. 

The room is tidy, notices Eddie, and full of objects in shapes and materials he doesn’t recognize—his eyes are attracted especially to the framed photographs on the walls, in full colors and a sharper quality than he would have imagined possible. He recognizes Ben in most of them, often in the company of the same five people, Richie included.  
A close up of a girl leaning on Ben’s shoulder, her fiery red hair spilled down his chest, takes the place of honor on his bedside table. 

“How come you’re so chill about this, Haystack?” Richie is saying, his long legs crammed up somehow on the chair. “This is not entertaining.”  
“I’m not _chill_ , Richie, I tried to karate chop him not two minutes ago!” argues Ben.  
Eddie, who understood roughly five words out of the whole exchange, says the only thing he feels is appropriate. “He is just upset that you didn’t immediately throw up like he did. To be frank, I preferred your reaction even if you tried to...karate chop me? Was that it?”

Richie starts snorting and giggling, making eye contact with Eddie and not looking away; even Ben huffs a laugh, more incredulous than amused. “You _are_ sentient,” he says in awe, as if the realization just struck him. “I’m still processing all this—I thought, maybe...Maybe Richie had somehow found a way to activate you and you could, like—move and say some recorded sentences. But you’re _sentient_.”  
Eddie nods, fixing the bow around his neck to occupy his hands. “I think so, yes.”  
“And _I_ didn’t do anything,” adds Richie.  
“That’s true, when I—somehow, I don’t know either—woke up, Richie was still sleeping.”

Ben studies him, a glint in eyes as his gaze flicks between the delicate joints of his fingers, his glass eyes, the exposed line of internal mechanisms under his knee where Eddie’s sock slipped down. He looks curious, but not like he will tear Eddie apart to see what makes him tick—just, fascinated. And close to tears, like Richie predicted. “I’ll go call Bill, and the others. You guys wait in here.”  
He untangles his legs from the sheets, and when he stands up Eddie only has a second to confirm the fact that yes, he is as tall as Richie, before Ben’s already running out of the room and down the stairs.

“Who are Bill and the others?” he asks, shifting closer to Richie.  
Richie smiles, looking up at him over the rim of his glasses. “These guys,” he explains, and passes him a framed photo Ben kept on his desk—Eddie recognizes Ben and Richie, plus the four other people he had already noticed in other pictures in the room. They’re all half undressed, Richie’s curls weighed down by water, smiling and posing together near a river, or maybe a lake. 

“He went to fetch all of them? It will take some time, then,” Eddie says.  
“Nah, he’s just went to the kitchen to call them.”  
“On a phone? In his _kitchen_? He must be rich!”  
“What? No, he’s—I mean, everyone has a phone in the house…? Do you even know what year it is?”  
Eddie rolls his eyes as much as his anatomy allows. “No, Richard, I’ve been alive for roughly two hours. How could I know?”  
Richie sticks his tongue out at him, which speaks volumes about his maturity because Eddie remembers children doing the same back when Dr. Kaspbrak used to show him off at the circus. “Jeez, were you programmed to be this mean? It’s 1993, bro, every house has a phone—and some people even have mobile ones.”  
“ _Mobile_? You mean you can carry them around?”  
“I mean, they’re big and ugly and run out of battery super fast, but yes: you can carry them around. Welcome to the future!” He emphasizes the point by spinning around in his chair—which Eddie didn’t know chairs could do—his long legs stretched in front of him, and he inevitably bangs his knee on the desk.  
“Wow, thanks, I’m so excited,” deadpans Eddie.  
“You should be excited! A lot of things happened since the Thirties, yanno? Movies have all sorts of special effects, _computers_ are a thing now, houses have running water-”  
“We also had running water in the Thirties, you nincompoop-”  
“-And we went to the Moon!”  
Eddie crosses his arms, which is somewhat difficult when the gears and levers that make up his elbows need a good oiling. “No one went to the _Moon_ , now you’re just making fun of me.” 

Richie laughs and stands up, looking excitedly at him. “Dude, I swear that’s true! There’s so much cool stuff you don’t know about, like videogames and Star Wars and- and Rock ‘n’ Roll. I get to introduce you to _Bruce Springsteen_ , Eddie, do you understand what honor that is?”  
Eddie tilts his head. “Is that another one of your friends?”  
“I...God, you don’t know how much it pains me to say no.”

In that moment, Ben re-enters the room. “ _Richie,_ ” he says, “can you keep your voice down? My mom is gonna hear you.”  
“Oh, _wow_ , you can’t let you mom know I’m in your bedroom? I’ve been in hers plenty of times.”  
Eddie’s mouth gapes open. “Are you always this _vulgar_?”  
“Believe it or not,” answers Ben, who’s rifling through a drawer near his bed, “he’s usually worse.” When he turns around his arms are full of folded clothes. “Eddie, you need to change your clothes to, uh...blend in a bit better. Do you mind wearing some of my old stuff? You’re gonna swim in it, but it’s better than nothing.”  
“I take it we’re going somewhere?” says Richie.  
“Yeah, I talked to the others. They’ll meet us at the Clubhouse.”

⛦⛦⛦ 

The Clubhouse, turns out, is a hole in the ground.

A cozy, furnished, solid-looking hole in the ground that Eddie immediately liked—or at least he did _after_ Richie had helped him get down the ladder, because for a terrifying moment he had thought Richie’s grip under his arms would slip and Eddie would fall and shutter to pieces.  
The reckless way in which Richie had rode his bike was probably to blame for Eddie’s uneasiness: sat on the back carrier, his arms locked around Richie’s waist, he had spent the entire ride through the Barrens (not that there was anything _barren_ about the stretch of wood) picturing the thousands of ways in which they could have died. Or, well, go back to not-living in Eddie’s case.  
He had calmed down after a while, thanks to the back and forth he had kept up with Richie— _bickering_ , Ben had called it, _and_ _it’s already worse than with Stan._

The Losers, as Richie had explained their little group is called, soon enough started piling in the Clubhouse. Beverly, whose red hair and green eyes looked even more vibrant than in the photos, had arrived first and demanded a hug from Eddie—which he’d gladly given, curious as he was to know what it would feel like. At first he had been scared of holding her too tight, but when she squeezed him closer, laughing in his shoulder, he had relaxed into it.  
Then came Bill, who stopped dead in his tracks as soon as Eddie said _hello, nice to meet you;_ and Mike, who had cried softly for a couple of minutes. Richie had found both reactions so hilarious he hadn’t stopped cackling until Beverly stole his glasses. 

They’re all perched on every flat surface the Clubhouse offers—apart from Richie, who’s lounging on a hammock and refuses to let anyone share it with him. Eddie, who can’t feel the fatigue of standing for too long, chooses to lean on one of the main columns that’s keeping the whole place from collapsing. 

The group is filled to the brim with curiosity, staring up at him with varying levels of disbelief painted on their faces, and Eddie tries to navigate the avalanche of questions as best as he can.  
“Okay, so you’re—alive. I guess,” says Mike, massaging his temples. “And you obviously know how to talk and stuff, so you must have some memories of your past. Right?”   
Eddie nods, tugging at the collar of the shirt Ben gave him to wear, big enough on him that it keeps slipping down his shoulder. “The first memory I have is from 1934, although I know my creator had been working on me for ten years prior to that. I distinctly remember the time I spent with him.”  
“W-What about after?” stutters the boy sitting next to Beverly on an upturned fruit crate. _Bill_ , Eddie recalls.  
“I remember being sold to someone else after Dr. and Mrs. Kaspbrak disappeared. It gets foggy after that, probably because I don’t have much to remember anyway. No one apart from Dr. Kaspbrak knew how to operate me.”  
Beverly’s expression softens. “They didn’t leave you to someone else before they died?” she asks.

Eddie’s internal mechanisms get jammed on his shock, and for a second he can’t move his eyes from the girl’s face. “Died?” he repeats when he goes back to normal.  
Richie rolls off the hammock, almost kneeing Ben in the face in the process. “Oh my God,” he exclaims, “was that your introduction to the concept of _mortality?_ Bev, what the fuck!”  
Beverly goes red, looking so genuinely regretful Eddie wants to hug her again. “I’m sorry!”

 _Died_.  
If Eddie woke up in 1993, he muses, then the Kaspbraks must have passed away a long time ago either way—but the thought that they hadn’t just _abandoned_ him one day hadn’t passed through his head. That the only reason why they have left him behind, he who they had so deeply cared for despite being nothing more than a bunch of gears and Dr. Kaspbrak’s genius, was that they died before their time.

To be fair, Eddie had been distracted by other things all day, what with the ‘coming to life’ business and all. 

“Eddie, you okay?” asks Ben, voice soft. 

_I don’t know,_ he thinks, _maybe not_. Is this what sadness feels like, the world going a bit more grey like a filter had been placed over his eyes, levers and pumps stuttering in his metallic chest? 

“I—yes,” he says instead. “I hadn’t considered that they could have passed away, it seems obvious in retrospect. And _death_ certainly wasn’t something people talked about around me, but I knew about it, Richie,” he remembers to add.  
Richie pushes his glasses back up his nose, shifting closer to him until their shoulders brush. “How? If no one talked about it, I mean— you obviously couldn’t just take a stroll and experience the world by yourself.”  
He’s not wrong. But Eddie was constantly surrounded by people, especially during those long days in the circus; people who talked and laughed and discussed around him, both children and adults. And of course, Dr. Kaspbrak used to talk to him all the time, as he made minor adjustments to his mechanisms or paint job, despite the fact the Eddie couldn’t answer.  
Everything he remembers now, all the knowledge he woke up with—from how to speak English to how to dress himself to the insults he’s been unleashing on Richie all day—comes from unwittingly listening to those people around him. 

But children at the circus laughed and pointed and _aaah_ ’d at him, they didn’t talk about relatives or friends who passed away. At home, neither did his creator—so why is Eddie so intimately familiar with grief, as if a fundamental part of his structure has a space carved for it? As if it was the base upon which he was built?

Then something clicks, and Eddie remembers. “I...oh,” he whispers. “ _Oh_. They lost a child.”  
“What? Who?”  
Everyone in the room looks mildly alarmed. “My creator and his wife,” he adds. “I think that’s why I know about death, and what it leaves behind.”  
Richie, leaning beside him on the same column, whistles softly. “Fuck me, that’s morbid.”  
“ _R-Richie._ ”  
“What? It is!” He waves his hand around to dismiss Bill, and Eddie notices for the first time that his nails are painted black. “But hey, I guess you don’t have to worry about that sort of stuff, right RoboCop? You cute, little, _unbeatable_ machine.” Richie’s grin is wide, and bright, and _insufferable._

Eddie twists his lips in what he hopes is a convincing frown. “Seeing how you ride your bike, I think I’m more worried about mortality than _you,_ you duke of limbs—”  
“Fucking _pardon_? Duke of _what_?”  
“It means you’re too tall for your own good and that you walk around like a newborn horse—”  
“You’re just jealous your daddy made you into a shortstack, _shortstack_.”  
Eddie digs an accusing finger on Richie’s chest, which is infuriatingly almost at eye level for him. “Dr. Kaspbrak wasn’t my daddy, he was an engineer and a _visionary_! I was, I _am_ his best creation—he could have sold me to a museum for a lot of money, _yanno,_ ” he says, mimicking the contraction Richie used back at Ben’s house.  
“Why didn’t he? Oh, I know: he was ashamed of how short he made your legs.”  
“I’m perfectly proportioned!”

“Oh my God,” laughs Bill, and Eddie snaps his attention from Richie’s dark eyes to see that everyone else is listening to them and grinning. “I c-can’t believe th-this—someone who can k-keep up with Trashmouth?”  
Mike pushes his shoulder against Bill’s, laughing along. “Yeah, and it had to be someone _engineered_ for it. Stan would have a field day if he were here.”  
Richie perks up at the name. “Talking about Staniel, where the fuck is he? Stalking birds somewhere?” he asks, making a show of checking if his friend is hiding somewhere—the curly haired one, realises Eddie, the only one he saw in the photos not present at the moment.

“When I talked to him on the phone he was, uh—well, not mad, but he seemed really upset,” explains Ben. “He thought I was pulling a prank on him when I told him what happened with Eddie.”  
Richie hums. “I’m not that shocked. He’ll come around, though, you know how he is.” And then, turning back to Eddie, his gaze soft despite the sharp line of his smile: “He’ll like you, I’m sure. You two can bond over the trauma of having to deal with me.”  
“Beep beep, Richie,” says Beverly.  
Richie leans in and cups his mouth behind ringed fingers. “She doesn’t like it when I talk badly about myself,” he stage whispers. “Ugh, what a _bore_ , right?”

Eddie laughs, for the first time that day—for the first time _ever_ —hard enough that the screws keeping together his chest protest against the strain. He instinctively leans on Richie, thoroughly enjoying both the laughing and the pressure of their bodies touching. When he looks up, Richie is _beaming_ at him. 

“Oh, _adorable_ ,” coos Mike, not unkindly.  
Richie still goes red, and the smile on his lips dies. “Shut up,” he mumbles, and takes a step away, leaving Eddie—well, not cold, because he can feel neither coldness nor warmth, but _less_. 

“Uh, so, what do we do now?” Eddie asks, trying to dissipate the awkwardness.  
Richie seems to recover from whatever went wrong just seconds ago, because he’s back to grinning and being generally as obnoxious as the bright green shirt he’s wearing. “I still have so many questions for you, and you must have a shitload of questions for us as well,” he says, “but for now, I think you should get settled in.”  
He gestures with a open hand to the hammock, as if to present it to Eddie.  
Eddie takes a second to understand. “You mean, settled in _here_?”

Richie nods excitedly. “Yeah! It’s safe here, no one even knows this place exists. He can stay, right guys?”  
“O-of course, E-Eddie,” says Bill. “We’ll bring so-some stuff from home for y-you. So you can k-kill the time while we’re g-gone.”  
“It’s not that you’re a _prisoner_ ,” quickly adds Ben. “You can leave if you want, but there are some people here in Derry...You wouldn’t want them to find you.”  
The others all hum and nod their agreement, looking either worried or sympathetic—Eddie has a vision of people with crowbars destroying his legs and stealing his parts for scrap metal, something he knows is a vague memory of one of Mrs. Kaspbrak’s more catastrophic scenarios. “I’ll stay here,” he promises.  
“We’ll be back soon.”  
“With a p-portable radio.”  
“And _comics._ _  
_“A Game Boy, too—and a Tamagotchi, why not, I have an old one and you might like it.”  
“Oh, and I have to show you some photos!” exclaims Mike, like he just remembered.  
“ _And_ ,” says Richie, with more _gravitas_ than the moment requires, clasping Eddie’s shoulders in his hands. “I’ll teach you _so_ many swear words, every single one in the English language plus a couple in Spanish. So you can insult me properly. What do you say?”

Eddie smiles again, and he finds that his face allows him to do it wider than this morning. “I say, _fuck yeah.”_

 _Maybe this sentience business is not so bad_ , he thinks as Richie giggles in delight, all dark curls and white teeth in the dim light of the Clubhouse. _No, not bad at all._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stan was not in this chapter because he wanted to give Richie and Eddie some space to have their gay bickering. He will be back, stronger than ever. 
> 
> You can find me @mere-mortifer on Tumblr!


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He calls Richie a dickhead and then looks at him with big, warm doe eyes—of course Richie is developing a crush at the speed of light, _are you kidding?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No a plot thread in sight, just people living in the moment :,)

_August 17th, 1993_

Richie wakes up with a groan at some ungodly hour of the morning.

Wait, no—he paws at the bedside table until he finds his glasses, and after pushing them up his nose he manages to read the clock: actually, it’s almost noon.  
To be fair, Richie fell asleep at 4am, and that's if he’s generous and counts that full hour of grinning with his face buried in a pillow as _sleeping_.

He’d been staying out very late for the past few weeks at this point, enough that his parents got it into their heads that he has a girlfriend somewhere, and even sat him down one day to give him the _Talk_.  
_A bit too late for that_ , had thought Richie, as he suffered through his mom trying to explain to him about the birds and the bees in a tactful way. It’s not like he hasn’t been jerking off to stolen porn magazines since he was thirteen—and definitely not the PlayBoys good ol’ Wentworth would have been happy to discover stashed under a faulty wooboard in his room. 

So no, dear God, there’s no _girlfriend_ to talk of; Richie’s just spending a lot of time with Eddie. 

Richie feels the blood rise to his face. That sure was a dangerous way of phrasing it, even in his head. 

The thing is, _the thing is_ : hanging out with Eddie is so fun, both when the rest of the Losers are there, and when it’s just the two of them, late at night after the others have slowly trickled out of the Clubhouse and Richie and Eddie have the whole place to themselves.  
Eddie still has so much to discover,everything 1993—and being _alive_ — has to offer him, and it’s a pleasure to introduce him to all sorts of nice things. Richie teaches him stupid clapping games he remembers from elementary school and how to play Monopoly, Would you rather?, Poker. He brings him all his old comics and books to read when he’s alone, with comments penciled in on the pages of Richie’s favourite scenes. He plays him good music, which Eddie turns up his cute little nose at, humming along to fucking _Backstreet Boys_ instead. 

That must be Ben’s fault somehow, he’s sure of it: that traitor must be corrupting him with his own terrible taste in bands. 

Talking about corrupting. Richie was only half-joking when he promised Eddie—threatened him, more like—to teach him how to swear properly, so he could drop those ridiculous insults from the Thirties he’d been using.  
But Eddie took to it, and _fast_. He was, and still is, elated at the freedom that has been granted to him, at the complete lack of formality that used to be so important back in the old days _._ _  
_ The first time he’d called Richie a _fuckface_ and then asked him if he did it right, Richie had genuinely almost teared up.  
“I’m so proud of you,” he’d said, pretending to dabb a tissue to his eyes, and he’d reveled in how Eddie had smiled and leaned on his shoulder.

And Richie really is proud of him.  
Eddie takes everything in stride, completely trusting Richie and the Losers to give him only good experiences—the only times he seems scared, or hesitant, is when his physical integrity is taken for granted. 

One day, as they were walking towards the Quarry with Mike and Bill to show Eddie around, Richie had proposed to take the shortcut and pass through a shallow stretch of the Kenduskeag where the Losers had placed stepping stones years ago.  
Eddie had stopped dead in his tracks at the mention of _water_ , talking a mile a minute about how he couldn’t get near it in case he falls in, because _I’ll rust if I do, guys, I really can’t, Mrs. Kaspbrak knew what was dangerous for me, and water was on top of the list—and you can’t find replacement parts for me, you know that right, what if I get damaged and stop being_ me _, stop being me and go back to being a, a thing—Richie, please, I_ can’t _._ _  
_ Bill and Mike had jumped in to assure him that they wouldn’t get him near the river, but Eddie had been looking only at Richie. Had locked their gazes with eyes so full of panic Richie’s breath had quickened to compensate for Eddie’s lack of lungs, as if by sharing part of the fear Richie could alleviate his burden. 

He hadn’t noticed how much more expressive Eddie’s face had looked compared to when he first woke up—he _was_ slightly busy cracking shitty jokes to calm him down—but the thought had struck him later that night when he was back home. 

So yeah, Richie already likes Eddie an absurd amount and he’s trying so, _so_ hard to think of him only as a friend. 

He’s failing miserably. 

He knew it when Eddie was lost in reading a beat up copy of _The Hobbit_ Ben gave him, and Richie had noticed the shadow his synthetic eyelashes threw over the freckles Bev had so carefully painted on his cheekbones—and had kept noticing it for the next three days whenever Eddie looked down.  
He knew it the second Eddie slipped on one of Richie’s hoodies because he still doesn’t have any other clothes, and despite his reassurances that he didn’t need any more, Richie had kept bringing him his own stuff just to see Eddie wearing it.

He knows it now, as he stares at the blinking 12:10pm on his digital clock and his very first thought is: _Eddie_. Coincidentally, exactly the same thought he fell asleep to. 

_Pathetic_ , Richie thinks, and nonetheless jumps out of bed to slip on the first clothes he finds. _So fucking stupid! He’s not even human._

Richie wishes that mattered. When his body stays hidden under multiple layers of mismatched clothes, Eddie doesn’t look any different than a normal seventeen-year-old boy—and the more time passes, the more he speaks and acts and emotes like one.  
Even when the illusion slips, and he catches Eddie dripping lubricant oil in the joint of his right elbow (which always gives him trouble), or standing stock still as Beverly retouches his paint where it faded—whenever Richie’s reminded that Eddie is a _machine_ , he still doesn’t care. 

Whatever. He’s the same guy who picked up a creepy looking doll covered in dirt and spiderwebs and got all mushy when _by chance_ its head rested in the hollow of his neck. Richie’s been weird about it since day one—no wonder it’s getting worse with every bickering session he has with Eddie. 

And so Richie already misses him, even though they last saw each not ten hours ago, _what about it?_

It’s ridiculous, he knows, how he stops in front of the mirror to fix his hair, as if Eddie is going to notice the artful way he organized his curls (which will last roughly three minutes, anyway) and not the _bold_ choice of clothing he’s made.  
Well, maybe ‘made’ is too a strong of word—more like the choice that was thrust upon him by fate, considering he’s picked some items at random from the pile of clean laundry: a Legend of Zelda t-shirt with the collar stretched out by wear, a pair of red socks peeking out of his Converse. Baggy, yellow pants that he bought because he saw a skater wearing something similar on MTV and Richie wanted to be _cool_ like him—but Richie’s never been cool, not a single day in seventeen years, and maybe it’s time to accept it as a dogma of his life and also possibly, _definitely_ throw the pants away. 

He studies his reflection. 

He looks like a disaster. 

“Ah, yes,” Richie says out loud, feigning smugness, “finally the outside matches the inside.”  
And then he’s sprinting down the stairs and out of the house, going back inside only to kiss his mom’s cheek and promise her that he’s not gonna get in trouble, just—  
“Hanging out with your friends, yes, I know,” she finishes for him. She fixes his shirt, which keeps slipping down one shoulder, and gives him a small affectionate smile. “Will Stan be there?”

Ah, Stan. Stan the Man. 

Richie should have taken him more seriously that night when he found Eddie and brought him at Bill’s house: Stan doesn’t like _weird_.  
Or, better put, Stan has no idea how to deal with weird.  
He’d avoided meeting the newly-alive Eddie for a good week, and when he’d finally showed up at the Clubhouse on a particularly torrid afternoon he’d started hyperventilating as soon as Eddie introduced himself and went to shake his hand. 

He came around, though, just like Richie knew he would.  
He’d even started bonding with Eddie, mostly because Stan had found in him an invaluable ally in the War Against Richie—which consists of 1) pretending they don’t find any of his jokes funny, 2) giving him sass about it and 3) proceeding to laugh at said jokes anyway.  
Richie can give credit where credit is due: Stan can restrain himself to a barely-there smile and keep up the façade; Eddie just starts laughing his ass off anyway, his voice tinged with a metallic echo that betrays what is hidden under his borrowed clothes. 

“Yeah, Stanley will be there,” he reassures his mom. She’s always seen him as Richie’s sensible guardian angel. Satisfied with the answer and visibly more relaxed, she lets him go only with the promise of being back for dinner. 

Richie rides his bike through familiar backstreets and pathways that bring him to the Clubhouse without being noticed by rest of Derry (Henry fucking Bowers in particular, God forbid _he_ finds out where the Losers hide all day), blasting Radiohead on his Walkman the entire time. 

He leaves the bike behind some trees, and makes his way to the hidden entrance of their safe haven. Not so hidden now, as the panel of plywood that doubles as a door is left open: Richie sinks to his knees and pops his head in; what greets him is the upside view of Eddie lying on the hammock and reading a Spider-Man comic. 

There’s a lot of _leg_ just left out in the open, as if Richie needs this sort of psychological torture in his life, because Eddie is wearing...shorts? Red running shorts. 

_Cute, cute, cute_. 

It’s weird how Richie has worked on cleaning and repairing Eddie’s body for weeks before he woke up, and had no problem moving him around, undressing him, even literally being _wrist-deep_ in his chest cavity when needed—but now he has to diverge his eyes from where the hem of Eddie’s shorts rest on the pale skin of his thighs to avoid going beet red in the face.  
Or popping a boner, which—no, uh uh, no way Jose. If that happens he will have to drown himself in the Quarry. 

The change must have happened somewhere between Eddie coming to life and him developing that fiery personality of his, because Richie doesn’t remember ever finding the mix of metal, porcelain and silicone of those legs _hot_ before. Are the materials fusing into something softer, more skin-like, or is Richie just developing some sort of antique doll kink that will fuck up his sexual life forever?

Well, Richie _does_ like boys. For all intents and purposes, the damage has already been done.

“Are those Beverly’s?” he asks after climbing down the ladder into the Clubhouse, and points to Eddie’s shorts. He just _needs_ to know.  
“Good morning to you, too, Richie,” huffs Eddie, giving up on reading the comic. “And yes, they are Beverly’s. She said they’ve always been too big for her, and that I can keep them if I want.”  
Richie swallows. “You gonna?”  
“Gonna what?”  
“Keep them.”

Eddie furrows his brows on those doe eyes of his and looks up at Richie. He must have figured out how to move his eyebrows somewhere in the past weeks, because by now he uses them almost aggressively to show what he’s thinking without having to say a word.  
_Ah,_ Richie thinks, not _saying words. I should try that sometimes._  
“...Why? Do _you_ want them?” asks Eddie.  
_“_ Nah,” Richie sniffs, waving a hand as if to swat Eddie’s gaze away from him. “Red doesn’t suit me.”  
Eddie snorts, swinging a leg off the hammock and lowering it to the ground. The tip of his shoe—still his original pair; brown leather; sensible—touches the ground to gently rock the hammock from side to side, and there’s this infinite second when Richie’s eyes linger on the curve of Eddie’s calf, and all he can picture is digging his fingers in and feeling the metal somehow give in under his touch like soft skin would. 

Richie’s had more explicit thoughts in his life. He doesn’t remember a single one of them making the blood ring in his ears quite like this. 

Eddie stays blissfully oblivious to all this. “Does red suit me?” he asks instead, forcing Richie to bite his tongue so he doesn’t say anything stupid. 

_Deflect! Deny! Distract!_ : his three lines of actions when he needs to change topic, and fast. 

He settles for deflection this time: “What the fuck do I know? Have you you seen how I’m dressed?” He shows off with one hand his eye-sore of an outfit, and Eddie starts softly laughing. “Not exactly a fashion designer, buddy.”  
“It’s pretty bad,” agrees Eddie.  
“Hey, fuck you, bro. You’re supposed to tell me that, actually, I do look good in these hideous pants.”  
“I don’t make a habit of going around spewing bullshit, Richie.” Eddie raises one eyebrow at him, smiling. “Did I use that right? _Spewing bullshit_?”  
Richie snorts. “You’re adorable, Pinocchio. Yeah, you used that right, you made papa _so proud._ ”  
“Gross, please don’t call yourself papa.”  
“So ungrateful!” moans Richie, letting himself fall on the comfiest chair in the Clubhouse—a cushiony old thing Stan’s parents wanted to throw away. “And after I taught you everything you know.”  
“Dr. Kaspbrak taught me everything I know,” corrects Eddie. 

“You always mention this guy, but you still haven’t told us much about him. And his—wife, right?”  
Eddie nods, shifting around on the hammock until he’s facing Richie. “Yes, his wife, Sonia.”  
“Uuh, _Sonia_. Was she _hot_?”  
“I don’t know, Richie, _does it fucking matter_?”  
“Jeez,” he laughs, “ _touchy_. Nevermind then, just tell me how life for an automata was back in the good old days of Polio and noir films.”

Eddie smiles at that, his eyes going round and unfocused as he gets lost in his memories.  
He does that sometimes. Richie can never stare at him for too long in those occasions—the faraway look on Eddie’s face seems to take his humanity away, and Richie’s terrified that one day it will stick and he’ll be gone for good.  
“Well, I’ve already told you that Dr. Kaspbrak used to show me off at a circus,” Eddie says.  
“Yeah, and then you _always_ change subject,” Richie argues.  
“I have to change subject because _someone_ starts doing a frankly abysmal impression of a clown everytime I mention the circus!”  
“Fuck you! My clown impression is spot-the-fuck- _on_.”  
Eddie throws one of Bev’s empty cigarette packages at his head. “You’re already a clown, Richie. Anything you add to that is overkill. _Anyway_ —Dr. Kaspbrak didn’t exactly work with the circus company, but they were more than happy to let him show me to the audience and give him a cut of the money. And Mr. and Mrs. Kaspbrak _needed_ that money.”  
“Wait a second,” interjects Richie, “wasn’t Dr. K really good at what he did? You’re clearly—well, you’re _revolutionary_. I would have said the same even if you hadn’t come to life. How come he didn’t have a job?”  
“What I know, I’ve heard from Mrs. Kaspbrak—Sonia—tell other people, always hush-hush. Dr. Kaspbrak was extremely talented, but he couldn’t follow orders to save his life, and working on projects he wasn’t interested in was impossible for him. You know he was hired to develop new car models for the Ford Motor Company?”  
Richie’s eyes went so wide they started to water. “Bullshit! And what, he got kicked out?”  
“He didn’t like cars that much,” explains Eddie with a shrug. “So he quit. And he went back to his favourite toys.”  
“Automata, you mean? Are there—did he make others. Like you.” 

The thought disturbs Richie, for reasons he can’t quite pinpoint. Is it because he wants Eddie to be special, one of a kind—or because he’s scared there _are_ others lying abandoned somewhere, looking as hopeless as Eddie did?

Thankfully Eddie solves his doubts with a simple shake of his head. “No. Smaller things: clocks and animals carved from wood that could move around; never anything else like me.”  
“Okay, well, that makes sense. You said it took him ten years to complete you, right?”  
“Yeah. And then for five, maybe six years after, we traveled around the U.S. with the circus company. Dr. Kaspbrak wasn’t _that_ charismatic as far as I can remember, and neither was I—”  
“Being an inanimate object will do that to a guy, Eds.”  
“—but the audience liked me well enough.”

“But what did you do?” asks Richie, dragging his chair closer to the hammock with not little noise. “What _could_ you do, Boy Wonder?”  
Eddie shows him his perfectly straight teeth, chiseled from Italian marble or some shit, in a wide smile. “Guess.”  
“ _Oooh_ , I like this game,” he says, and rubs his hands in preparation. “Okay, uuh—you were a trapeze artist! You did all sort of dangerous moves and flips, no net to catch you!”  
“Not even remotely.”  
“You were a contortionist?”  
“I’m made of metal and porcelain, Richie, not exactly flexible.”  
“You walked through fire?”  
“ _What?_ ”  
“Juggling?”  
“Nope.”  
“Mime?”  
“Uh uh.”  
“You were the unbeaten champion in spaghetti eating competitions?”

That makes Eddie laugh, his nose scrunching up in that adorable way that has gotten more and more prominent with time—which is exactly why Richie said something so stupid. “What the fuck, that isn’t a real thing! Spaghetti eating competitions?”  
“I don’t know,” moans Richie, dramatically sliding off the chair, “I ran out of cool circus skills, Eddie.” 

A light goes off in his head. The smile that spreads over Richie’s face is slow to build, but when it’s there it feels more like a manic grin than anything. “Oh my God, that’s perfect,” he whispers.  
“What?”  
Richie looks up at Eddie, who’s still perched on the hammock and looking at him with a frown. “ _Eddie_.”  
“Uh, yes…?”  
“ _Eddie Spaghetti_.”  
Eddie blinks a few times in rapid succession, like he does whenever he’s presented with something particularly complex. Or particularly stupid. Then he groans, flopping back on the hammock with his hands over his eyes. “No, that’s—that’s terrible, Richie. Please don’t.”  
“Please don’t what, Eddie Spaghetti?” he asks innocently.  
“Don’t call me that! I prefer Pinocchio, I even prefer _Eds_.”

Richie’s smile, damn his inability to control his trashmouth in any way, loses any grin quality and goes all soft and mushy. “Do you really?”  
The words slip out without his permission. Richie’s the only one to use the nickname _Eds,_ and Eddie always makes a show of not liking it whenever the other Losers are around—to the point that it became a recurring bit for them, one of Richie’s favourites because it gives him the excuse to touch Eddie when they inevitably end mock-fighting about it. 

Richie’s noticed how Eddie never protests the nickname if it’s just the two of them. Sometimes he thinks about it—at night, in those hazy minutes between consciousness and sleep, when the pillow under his cheek is as cool and soft as the silicone skin of Eddie’s hands.

“Yes,” says Eddie, and once again he’s blissfully unaware of the effect he has on Richie. “I don’t mind _Eds_.”  
He confesses it like it’s this big secret he wants to share with Richie, and Richie only. _Don’t tell the others, or they’ll call our bluff._

And Richie so desperately wants to keep that excuse—to rile Eddie up, to have his undivided attention. To touch him. 

His heart jumps in his throat. There’s no one else there with them, certainly no one that could hear what he just thought— but the feeling of an audience sneering at him, at the heat creeping up his neck and the sweat coating his palms, makes his way into Richie’s brain and he can’t shake it off.  
“But Eddie Spaghetti,” he exclaims—too loud, too awkward, a joke falling flat. “Spaghedward, Mr. Spaghetti, _Spaghetti Nation._ The possibilities are endless. I can’t restrain myself to a puny three-letter nickname.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, but there’s a smile tugging at his rose-tinted lips (titanium white, hansa yellow, cadmium red, Bev mixed the shade herself) and it succeeds in relaxing Richie’s frayed nerves. “You’re such a _fucking_ idiot. A goddamn, stupid-ass dickhead. Did I use those right?”  
Richie snorts, and it quickly turns into a laugh that goes on for so long his abs hurt. 

There’s just something about neat, eloquent Eddie reciting swear words like it’s his life mission to pepper them into every sentence and then turning to Richie for approval that gets right to his funny bone. 

He calls Richie a dickhead and then looks at him with big, warm doe eyes—of course Richie is developing a crush at the speed of light, _are you kidding?_

“Yeah, you used those right,” he manages to wheeze between laughing fits. Eddie gets all proud, which is so _cute_ , and Richie decides that the best course of action is to climb his way onto the hammock and wrestle Eddie for space until he’s breathless for more reasons than the obvious. 

“So, you give up on guessing?” asks Eddie when they’ve settled down. Richie’s legs are stretched on all the available length of the hammock, crossed at the ankles, and Eddie’s resting his head on Richie’s naked shin.  
“Yeah,” sighs Richie, “just tell me, you gremlin.”  
Eddie smiles, and knocks at Richie’s shoulder with his foot. “Writing,” he explains.  
Richie blinks at the non-sequitur. “Uh, what?”  
“That’s what I used to do.”  
“That’s _it_?”  
“People liked the show, fuckface! Dr. Kaspbrak would sit me down in front of a desk with paper and ink—we had a little booth for ourselves, you know, I never went on the main stage. A small audience would gather round, and Dr. Kaspbrak would pick someone at random. ‘You, young miss, what would you like my boy Edward to write to you?’ and the person would say _oh, a love poem_ or _something funny!_ And Dr. Kaspbrak would lean down and pretend to tell me in secret what to write. But he was actually programming the words in himself.”  
Eddie makes a vague gesture to the right side of his chest, and something clicks in Richie’s memory. “With those little levers, right? I remember Stan and Ben going crazy trying to figure out what they were for. The rest of us gave up and just cleaned them as best as we could.”  
“You’re not the only ones who did. The system was complex, borderline chaotic, and only Dr. Kaspbrak knew how it worked. The audience had no idea what was really happening because he would make a big show of whispering something in my ear—meanwhile, he would sneak a hand in a panel of my jacket left open, here, on my side, and maneuver the little levers and buttons. The mechanisms would start moving a few seconds later, and I would write on paper what he dictated.”

Richie whistles his admiration, and giggles when Eddie rolls his eyes. “Okay, that’s pretty cool, I gotta admit. Kudos to Dr. K,” he says. “Is that why your hands are so articulated? They were, like, super important for the act?”  
Eddie nods. “Yes. The joints needed to be fluid enough to allow me to write in cursive.”  
“Oooh, _fancy_ _shmancy!”_ _  
_ “It was!” laughs Eddie, “Really fancy shmancy, whatever that even means. I think I can still write like that, I’ll show you one day.”  
Richie grins. “Yes, please. And you better bust out your best rhymes and write me a love poem for the _ages_.”  
“I will not _bust out_ anything, Rich, that sounds dangerous _and_ disgusting—”  
“But Spaghedward!”  
“Oh God, I was hoping you’d forgotten about that.”  
“We had that conversation five minutes ago, of course I remember. I’m not a fucking goldfish!”  
“Are you sure? You do share a lot of facial features with a goldfish, like having eyes too big for your own head.”  
“I share some _facial_ features with your mom, _ifyouknowhatimean_.”  
“I _don’t_ know what you mean, I’m _so glad_ I don’t know what—no, don’t explain, _I swear to God, Richie_ —”

It goes on for a while. 

Stan would roll his eyes so hard if he could hear the absurd argument they fall into, Richie can picture it clear as day in his head—but, for the moment, it’s just Eddie and him in the cozy haven of the Clubhouse and Richie can, and _will_ , annoy the shit out of him to his heart’s content. 

⛦⛦⛦

They’re not alone for long. 

Minutes after Richie’s stomach starts protesting the lack of food, they hear laughter and footsteps filtering in from the world above. One of the voices is clearly Beverly’s, and sure enough her pink ankle boots start coming down the ladder seconds later.

Richie has a moment of panic when he remembers how close Eddie and him are lying on the hammock, but he chokes down the instinct to scramble away. He refuses to be as scared of his own friends as he is of the rest of this fucking town. 

“Hi, Eddie,” she says as she comes down, and someone above her, Stan, echoes her.  
“Hi, guys,” responds Eddie as they both make their way into the Clubhouse.  
Stan is wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a print of flying birds so small it’s barely noticeable—he has it buttoned up all the way to neck even in the heat of July, _the monster_. Meanwhile, Beverly keeps flaunting her new-found talent as a designer by looking good in _anything_ she puts on, even the combo of pink boots and all-denim she has on today. 

No wonder Ben spends half of his waking hours a blushing mess. Richie might not be into girls, but he has eyes—which zero in on the Mars bar peeking out of Bev’s back pocket, and _that will do just fine, thank you very much._  
He snatches it out as Bev walks by and she swats at his hand, but Richie's stomach decides in that moment to groan loudly so she just lets him keep the snack. “What, no greeting for me?” he asks, mouth already full with a generous bite.  
“No,” Stan answers, looking awfully nonchalant.  
“Cool. I guess I’ll go fuck myself then.”  
“You do that too often already.”  
Richie gasps in mock offense, and the effect is only somewhat ruined by how sticky with caramel his mouth feels. “Staniel!” he shrills, “not in front of the _baby_!”  
Eddie takes a second to realize _he_ ’s the baby in question, but when he does he flips off Richie so fast that the gears in his elbows groan and creak. He’s rolling off the hammock before Richie can do what he was planning, aka ruffling his hair with chocolate-stained fingers and face the consequences of his actions.

Alas, Eddie’s already out of reach. And standing with his back to Richie, which offers him a clear view of how his backside looks in those shorts, not that Richie lets himself enjoy said view for more than 0.2 seconds before he buries his nose in the comic Eddie left on the hammock. 

Richie would like to have a word with Dr. K., just to clarify what the scientific reason to shape Eddie’s ass like _that_ was.  
Absolutely _no reason_ , that’s the answer. Life just wants Richie _to suffer_. 

Eddie, bless his soul, is already sitting on the table Mike and Bill built for a corner of the Clubhouse two years ago. There are paint brushes jammed in jars and scattered all over it, plus a box full of half-squeezed paint tubes that rests in a corner: the supplies Beverly uses to retouch Eddie’s paintjob.  
His skin looks and feels remarkably realistic (despite Eddie mentioning time and time again that it’s made of soft silicone), but the color never seems to stick for long. After a few days the white of the porcelain and smooth metal that lies underneath start to peek through. 

Sure enough, Eddie calls Bev closer to show her the back of his neck. “Can you fix it for me? I tried doing it myself last night, but—” _  
_ _“_ Yeah, no problem,” she assures him. Her hands are already busy mixing the right shade of pink.  
“Thanks, Bev.”

As the two of them get to work, Richie and Stan idly chat about the imminent start of school and make plans to go the Arcade sometime next week.  
Richie’s eyes keep falling on the line of Eddie’s neck, and the way Bev holds the hair on his nape out of the way, mindless in that she has not to worry about the implications, or consequences, of her touch.

If Stan notices the envy-green tint Richie’s voice has taken, he’s too graceful and too kind to mention it.

⛦⛦⛦

“Uh, Bev?” Richie asks. 

He’s been thinking on how to introduce the topic in a non-conspicuous way for the better part of their walk back home.  
It’s just Bev and him, walking side by side through the Barrens and in the neighborhoods on the outskirt of Derry to reach her aunt’s house. Stan remained at the Clubhouse with Eddie and Ben, who had joined them a couple of hours ago after his shift as a volunteer at the library. What a nerd.  
Richie himself left only because he promised his mom he’d be home for dinner. And, to be fair, he didn’t like the idea of leaving Bev to go back home by herself. Mike, who has the misfortune of being Bowers’ neighbor, swears that Henry is acting more unhinged than usual.

Like, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he sets my house on fire one of these days” unhinged, as Mike put it. 

Yeah, it’s better if none of the Bowers Gang’s Most Wanted walks anywhere by themselves. 

“Yeah, Richie?” says Beverly, turning to look at him.  
Richie tries to keep his tone neutral when he asks: “Is painting like, hard?”  
“I mean, it wasn’t easy at first but when I got the hang of it, it wasn’t so bad. Why do you ask?”  
“If you make fun of me, I swear…” Richie warns her, refusing to look at Bev in fear that he’ll lose his cool and make some gross joke to change the subject.  
“I wouldn’t steal your role of class clown, Tozier, relax,” she reassures him. “Are you trying to say that you’d like to learn?”  
“Maybe. It looks fun.”  
“ _Mh mh._ ”  
Richie splutters, indignant, his too-long hair falling over his eyes. “And what does _that_ mean?”  
“Nothing, really,” laughs Bev, wrapping her arm around Richie’s. “I just don’t think that’s the only reason why you’re interested all of a sudden, that’s all.”  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he denies. “Your skillz at painting got me mad jealous, and now I want to learn as well.”  
“Is that what you’re jealous of, my skill _z_?”  
“ _Bev._ ”  
“ _Richie_ ,” she mocks his tone. She presses closer to Richie’s side in a weird hug that he can’t reciprocate because his bike is in the way. “It’s okay if you want to do it for Eddie, that’s very _sweet_.”  
“Sweet? You take that back!”  
“Oh, shut up.” They reach Bev’s house, and she takes a step back from him, one finger raised in warning. “I’ll teach you— _at a cost_.”  
Richie shrugs. “Name your price.”  
“I want you to make me a mixtape.”  
“That’s it?” he exclaims. He didn’t expect her to ask anything too bad of him, but he knows for a fact that Stan or Mike would have abused their power in Bev’s position. “I’ll make you a mixtape, I’ll make you a mixtape so _sexy_ it’ll melt your panties right off—”  
“Bye, Richie,” Bev says, and turns to walk through her front door.  
“I’m kidding!” he yells, which Mr. Davis, who’s watering his plants in the neighboring garden doesn’t appreciate, if his glare is any indication. “I’m sorry, Red, I’ll behave.”  
Bev stops on the porch and gives him a satisfied smile. “Mh, good.”  
“It’s a deal, then?”  
“It’s a deal. Come back here tomorrow.”

Richie half expects her to finish with a _we ride at dawn_ , but she just waves him goodbye and watches him mount his bike and pedal away until he’s out of sight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [rea_of_sunshine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rea_of_sunshine/pseuds/rea_of_sunshine/works) made this readable, go show her some love <3
> 
> I hope you guys liked this chapter!  
> [Fanart](https://reddieforakiss.tumblr.com/post/619866308431036416/im-only-halfway-through-chapter-3-of) by @reddieforakiss on Tumblr | [Alternative link](https://archive.org/details/dadoes-artwork-by-reddieforakiss)


	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie knows he’s being ridiculous. He’s spending every free moment with Eddie, and no amount of _I just don’t want him to feel lonely!_ can erase the knowing looks on his friends' faces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a day late because I'm a dumbass who can't count properly. Here's 4000 words of pining!Richie to make up for it!  
> (Also, if you guys noticed the tag for homophobia: this is where it starts to get pretty bad.)

_September 10th, 1993_

Richie stands, dead on his feet, side by side with Bill and Stan. 

They are staring ahead at the chaos of people chatting and walking, most of them with the same dejected expression of the trio.  
“Tell me I why already want to die,” Richie groans, curving under the weight of his backpack like a weeping willow.  
Bill knocks his shoulder into Richie’s. “B-because you sl-slept four hours before the fi-first day of school?”  
“Yeah,” he grumbles, “but only because I was with Eddie.”  
“Surprise, surprise,” comments Stan, grinning at Richie’s death-glare—possibly the first time Richie pulls it off, and that’s only because he has eyebags dark enough to pass off as bruises. The smudged eyeliner Bev put on him the day before that he has no idea how to clean off properly adds to the overall effect.  
“Oh, fuck off. I don’t want to leave him alone for too long, he could get bored. Or lonely.”  
Bill shifts on his feet, and exchanges a weird look with Stan that Richie can’t decipher. It makes him want to crawl back in bed even more, or storm off inside the school and sit far away from them in every class—but he chalks that up to crankiness. He is, after all, sleep-deprived.  
“I-I’m sure he ap-appreciates the company, R-Richie,” Bill says, not a hint of sarcasm on his serious face. He hasn’t smiled much since he lost Georgie; only Mike seems able to bring back his old self, when he was a knobbly-kneed middle schooler ready to lead the Losers into battle, screaming _hi ho, Silver, away!_ in the wind.

Richie, like everytime Beverly mentions her piece-of-shit father even in passing, takes a hard look at his life and decides that he’s one of the lucky ones. Big, scary secret or not, he should stop acting like his friends are going to turn into ruthless bullies every time they as much as _imply_ he’s getting close to Eddie. 

He relaxes his shoulders and smooths his frown by pushing his glasses up. “I guess we get along pretty well,” he concedes. 

Stan glances at his watch and waves a hand to encourage the other two to get to class before they’re late. “Get along? You argue constantly, Richie,” he says as they enter the school.  
Without much effort, because now he’s tall enough not to get pushed around by the older kids, Richie avoids all the students who are walking in the opposite direction. “The fuck does that mean, Staniel? Eddie and I got the art of _playful banter_ down to a T.”  
“Ye-yeah,” agrees Bill, “and y-you and Richie argue a-all the time as we-well.”  
Stan sniffs. “It’s different.”  
Richie wraps an arm around Stan’s shoulder, grinning as wide as his face will let him. “Oh, are you _jealous_?” he coos. “You break my heart, truly. Don’t you know you’re the only one for me?”  
“Alright, I get it—”  
“—and even if your parents want you to settle down with some nice Jewish girl, Stanley, I’m _so_ ready to elope and get fucking _married_ , honey. Let’s do it! Let’s go to Las Vegas, get absolutely trashed on margaritas and let an Elvis Presley impersonator do the rest.”  
Stan finally starts laughing, which Richie counts as a success, even as Stan wrestles his arm away from him and almost knocks his glasses off. “I’d never get married in _Vegas_.”  
“Is _that_ the only objection you have?”

Richie keeps walking down the hall with Stan, at least until a hand grips the back of hoodie.  
“R-Rich,” says Bill, still tugging him back to where he waits in front a class door, “we have M-Math together.”  
“Oh shit, right. Stan?”  
Stan shakes his head, avoiding a panicked freshman who almost crashed into him. “I have History. See you at lunch break with the others?”  
“Alright, later!”

Bill and Richie make their way into class, and Richie claims the desk behind Clarissa Foxglove, whose wild, curly hair will hide him from the professor if he slumps over his desk _just right_.  
It’s not that Richie doesn’t like Math—despite his attention deficit he _is_ a good student, a trait that has in equal parts made his parents very proud and Richie _very_ bullied. Sometimes he just likes to zone out during class, that’s all, and Clarissa’s hair is perfect for the job. 

To no one’s surprise, the next hour passes sluggishly, and so does the rest of the school day—the only highlights are lunch break with the rest of the Losers, minus Mike (who goes to Derry Baptists School) and Eddie (who Richie misses a ferocious amount); and...well. Richie wouldn’t call it a _highlight_ , his accidental meeting with Bowers, but it certainly was memorable. 

Henry had entered the bathroom, Patrick and Belch in tow, just as Richie was drying off his hands. 

_There must be some curse over this place,_ he thought as Henry locked eyes with him through the mirror. 

The worst moments of Richie’s life happened in one of the school’s bathrooms.  
Getting beaten up in second grade until his last baby tooth fell out.  
Holding Bill close to his chest as sobs wrecked his body, two weeks after Georgie was found drowned in the Kenduskeag, and hearing him stutter _it’s all my fault_ in Richie’s ear like it was an undeniable truth.  
Biting back his own tears, on his knees inside a stall, as he furiously scrubbed at the _Richie Tozier sux flamer cock_ someone had written on the wall in permanent marker.

So being in there, alone with Henry _fucking_ Bowers and the rest of his spineless gang didn’t bring back any _fond_ memories.

“Look who’s here, guys” Bowers drawled. “Our resident fag! How you doing?”  
Richie’s blood turned cold, but he refused to shrink back like he would have a few years ago. Bowers was vicious, and his so-called friends were as prone to violence as him, but Mother Nature hadn't made Richie grow up to 6’2” in the span of two summers just to see him cower at the sight of some petty bullies. 

So he stood as tall as he could, heart jack-hammering in his chest, and turned to face Henry. “I’m doing just fine. Actually, I was _leaving_.”  
“Did we fucking ask?” commented Patrick, and all three snickered at the joke like it was the funniest shit they’d ever heard.  
Richie moved around them to get to the door, hoping that if he was fast enough they would let him go—because Richie wanted to go back to Eddie in the afternoon, and he _really_ didn’t want to show up with a broken nose if he could avoid it. Unfortunately, Bowers’ arm gripped his wrist and stopped his retreat.  
“Whatcha got there?” he said, eyeing Richie’s hands. “Fucking nail polish, fag? You’re not even trying to hide it anymore, Jesus.”  
“Just let me leave, Henry.”  
“I guess it’s better this way,” he kept going as if he had never been interrupted. “At least _everyone_ will know for sure, especially all those new freshmen boys. You like ‘em young, don’t you?”  
“The younger the better!” added Belch, and back to laughing and sneering they all went. 

Richie closed his eyes shut and prayed that he could keep the tears threatening to spill at bay. 

The jokes about AIDS, during the worst of the outbreak years ago, had been _relentless_ —but nothing can make Richie’s skin crawl more than these assumptions that he goes after _kids_. Of course he fucking _doesn’t_ , Richie doubts even Bowers himself believes what he’s saying, but they make Richie feel dirty, disgusting. They shame him like nothing else.  
Henry knows, which is why he _keeps_ making them—and Richie can’t ever say anything to dispute them, because _I don’t like kids_ will get twisted in _but I do like boys_ and that will be the irrefutable proof that Richie is, indeed, the faggot they believe him to be.

So he usually lets them make their jokes, and he keeps his mouth shut, and he counts the days to when he won’t need to see Bowers’ rotten teeth sneer at him ever again. 

Except that his friends call him Trashmouth for a reason. Except that if he had always succeeded in keeping said trash mouth shut, Richie wouldn’t have gotten half the beatings he did. 

“What’s the problem, Henry,” he said before he could stop himself. “You jealous my type isn’t guys with a deadbeat dad and a bright future as a meth addict?”  
Bowers’ grip on his arm tightened, and a second later Richie was left breathless by a punch to the solar plexus. He almost collapsed to his knees from the pain, but Henry’s hand on his neck kept him upright. “I’ve told you before not to mention my fucking dad! Or apart from wanting to take it up the ass, you _also_ have a death wish, faggot? ‘Cause I can make one of the two a reality.” 

There was a manic glint in his eyes, and Richie remembered with chilling clarity that this asshole had poisoned and killed Mike’s dog _for fun_ when he was just thirteen.  
And still, _still_ , he opened his mouth again and said: “And which one of the two would that be, sweetheart?”

Bowers face went red with barely controlled anger. “Patrick, gimme your knife,” he said.  
Patrick and Belch tentatively laughed, like they were not sure if Henry was joking or not. “Uh, what? For real?”  
“I said give me the fucking knife!” he yelled, so loud even his friends flinched back. 

_He really wants to kill me_ , Richie thought, and _there’s something wrong with him_ —and with that he meant, obviously, that there was something _more_ wrong with him than usual, because Henry had always been cruel but had never lost touch with reality like this. He was about to slit Richie’s throat in a school’s bathroom, with witnesses, because of the slightest of provocations—and Richie seriously doubted there was any thought for consequences swimming in Henry’s head at that moment. 

The ice-cold fear in his blood gave Richie enough strength to get free of Bowers’ grip, just as someone knocked on the bathroom door.  
“Who’s in there?” asked a man from outside—Professor Jones, an actual responsible adult, _thank God._

Henry hesitated at the voice, a semblance of worry flashing on his face, and Richie took advantage of the distraction to slip out of the bathroom as fast as he could.  
He almost crashed into the English teacher, a kind, mustached man who might be shorter than Richie but looks much more solid than he can ever hope to be. “Tozier?” the professor asked, furrowing his thick brows in confusion.  
“Hi, yeah, sorry, gotta go,” Richie mumbled, and he didn’t exactly _run_ _for his life_ to the safety of the cafeteria—but it was a close thing.

Stan, perceptive as usual, noticed Richie was shaken the second he laid eyes on him—he spent the entire lunch break glued to his side, his thigh pressed against Richie’s under the table, and it was a comfort he needed more than he can put into words. 

The last bell couldn’t have arrived fast enough.

The last bell can’t arrive fast enough the day after, either; and the day after that, and the day after that.  
You get the gist. 

Richie’s constantly jittery and distracted during every last period, which Algebra has the misfortune of being for most of the week. He spends it paying more attention to the clock’s arms ticking by than to the professor.  
He’s always gone the second he can, so he can get to the Clubhouse—which is to say that he can get to _Eddie_.  
Richie knows he’s being ridiculous. He’s spending every free moment with Eddie, and no amount of _I just don’t want him to feel lonely!_ can erase the knowing looks on his friend’s faces.  
Stan’s is the worst.

No, scratch that, _Bev_ ’s is the worst, because if Richie is not with Eddie or with the Losers, he’s cooped up in the spare room of her house she uses as an atelier, getting fucking _painting lessons_ —and that gives her a lot of ammunition to use against him.  
She’s not mean about it. Of course she isn’t, she’s Bev.  
But Richie still gets a stomach ache everytime she looks at his handiwork and tells him that he’s doing really well; that he’s surpassing the master ( _not_ true, Richie is mediocre at best for now). Every positive comment translates in Richie’s head to _next time Eddie needs help, he can come to you,_ so that he can hardly look at her in the eye when she pays him a compliment.

One time, as he’s mixing drops of colors to get a warm brown, Richie vividly pictures tilting Eddie’s face up to add more freckles on the bridge of his nose, to paint over the lovely curves of his face until he looks like a sun-kissed prince of days gone by. 

He imagines the way the angle of Eddie’s jaw would feel under his fingertips, the smoothness of the skin and the bite of his ivory teeth. Eddie’s hair brushing on Richie’s chin, they would be standing so close; a hand feather-light beneath the fabric of Richie’s shirt, maybe, or held in Richie’s own so he could feel how the cold metal moves under the silicone. 

Richie doesn’t get a lick of sleep that night. The scene keeps playing on a loop in his head, and every time with a new detail that makes him sigh to himself in the dark of his room.  
He knows he’s done for the second he thinks of Eddie’s eyes, and his brain quickly provides a gallery of memories where Eddie’s lack of regard for personal space gave him the opportunity to see them up close—and it’s devastating, how masterfully painted the irises are between the layers of glass and resin. Eddie’s eyes were created to make him look alive, to steal and reflect all the light in a room, and Richie is thankful, once again, for whatever possessed Dr. K. to spend ten years working on a life-size automata of a boy. 

Oh, this is bad. Really, really bad.  
Not only because he’s lying awake almost every night waxing poetic about Eddie’s eyes, which is pathetic enough as it is; not even because most times his hormone-filled body takes the reins and the fantasies turn less innocent and more about how it would feel to push his hips on Eddie’s and have his toned thighs under his hands—no, that’s not the worst part.  
The worst part is that Eddie’s starting to figure himself out, as the weeks go by, and Richie likes the person he’s becoming so, _so_ much. He’s fiery, and sweet, and reflective—one second he’s yelling about how doesn’t give a shit if liking disco music is embarrassing, _he likes it anyway_ ; and the next he’s rewriting Richie’s History notes in his impeccable penmanship just so that Richie doesn’t need to. Sometimes, when all the Losers are hanging out in the Barrens and there are three conversations going on at once, he catches Eddie staring off into space in that way that makes it look like his strings got cut off, and he’s scared it means Eddie doesn’t enjoy being there with them as much as Richie does.

This crush is not a result of Eddie having an objectively pretty face; it’s not the affection that comes from finding and caring after something for weeks and see it come alive under your eyes.  
Richie just likes the guy. He likes- _likes_ him. 

It’s a fucking disaster. He can see all the reasons _why_ it’s a fucking disaster every time they’re bickering and laughing and leaning against each other and Richie catches Stan’s look, like he has a comprehensive list of them tattooed on his forehead for Richie’s benefit. 

Thank fucking God Stan’s not there to see how furiously red Richie’s face gets when Eddie just drops a _doozy_ of a question. 

It’s just them, plus Bev and Ben, sat on a picnic blanket on a bare patch in the Barrens to soak up the last summer sun. Richie has been going on a tirade about why _Groundhog Day_ is actually a psychological thriller when Ben, between fits of laughter, tells him to fuck off. Hearing him swear is a such a treat that Richie _has_ to tease him about it, so he clutches his metaphorical pearls and gasps _you kiss your mother with mouth?_ , which prompts Eddie to say

“What’s that like?”  
He’s sitting with perfect posture like the good scholar he is, back straight and knees bent underneath him, head tilted in curiosity.  
“What’s what like?” Bev asks, a sliver of cigarette smoke escaping her lips with the words.  
Eddie looks untroubled when he says, “Kissing. Well, maybe not your mother—I remember Sonia kissing my cheek from time to time, I think I remember what that feels like. I mean kissing someone else, the way every singer seems to be obsessed with.” He furrows his brows over the almond shape of his eyes. “Is it as good as they say?”

He throws the question out there and it somehow lands on Richie’s lap, sizzling hot, so that its warmth spreads from between his legs up to his body, until Richie’s face burns like he’s stayed in the sun too long.  
Richie doesn’t know if kissing is as heart-shattering as love songs would make you think. Despite all his bragging, he has kissed only two girls before, both experiences empty and underwhelming for reasons he refused to acknowledge at the time—but looking at Eddie, he thinks that he’d like to find out. 

The silence stretches for eons. 

No, wait, that’s just Richie losing his mind so hard it feels like he’s bending the rules of space and time. Beverly blows out an impressive smoke ring and picks up the question only seconds later, _God bless this woman._ _  
_ “Well, I guess it depends,” she muses. “When you don’t really like the person you’re kissing it’s just sort of…”  
“Mushy,” finishes Ben.  
“And awkward.”  
“And wet,” adds Richie, trying to sound grossed out and missing the mark by several miles.  
Eddie thankfully doesn’t pick up on his weird, breathless tone and just scrunches his nose up in disgust. “Then why do people do it?”

Bev smiles and leans back on her elbows, stretching her legs under the sun. “Ah, but see, Eddie, it’s different when you kiss someone you do like. That’s when the magic happens,” she says, and sneaks a glance at Ben that doesn’t go unnoticed, if the way his eyes comically widen is a hint.  
Richie, because misery loves company, thoroughly enjoys seeing Ben’s face go as crimson as Bev’s hair.  
“When you kiss someone you like, you want to keep going until you lose all breath,” she explains. “Your stomach ties up in knots, you heart starts beating so fast you’re worried it’s gonna jump out of your throat—and your head starts swimming. If it’s a _really_ good kiss, you even lose feeling in your legs and your knees buckle under you, so the other person has to hold you tight or you’ll both fall down.”  
Eddie looks bewildered. “All of those sound like symptoms of a terrible illness!”

Bev and Ben start laughing, and Richie forces himself to join them, even if the image Bev painted in his head has left him shaken.  
(pushing Eddie against a wall, curling their tongues together until Richie’s legs give in and they both slide to the floor, still tangled in each other—)  
_Get a fucking grip_ , he chastises himself, _and does Eddie even have a tongue anyway?_

He’s never checked. He really wants to check.

“Yeah, it’s a sickness called lu _uuurv,”_ jokes Beverly, rolling on her side she’s laughing so hard—and the hand-rolled cigarette between her fingers _might_ actually be a joint, now that Richie looks closer, which both explains a lot about how this conversation is going and is _super rude_ ‘cause she didn’t offer him even a hit.  
“It does kind of hurt, you know?” Ben says. “But in a good way. It’s intense, it’s…it’s hard to explain, you just have to feel it.”  
Eddie hums, thoughtful, and Richie can feel the weight of his gaze on him even as he pointedly looks elsewhere. “Maybe one day I will,” he says, and it rings in Richie’s ears like a promise, or a cruel joke, for the rest of the afternoon. 

⛦⛦⛦ 

_September 20th, 1993_

“There’s literally _nothing_ useful here,” Richie whispers angrily. He has to keep his voice down or they’ll get kicked out of the library for real this time.  
“Get another a book, then,” suggests Mike. He’s nose-deep in a tome old enough that its yellow, decaying pages make Richie’s eyes water even at a distance. Mike’s fingers are holding it so reverently you’d think he’ll declare that _it belongs in a museum!_ any second now. 

They’re cooped up in a corner of the Derry library, encyclopedias and books of folklore spread around on their table between empty coffee cups and disregarded school texts.  
Mike, in his everlasting love for research, convinced Richie to _not_ study for his imminent English test, and instead join him in emptying out the Myth and Folklore section of the library to find out what the _fuck_ can bring an automaton to life. 

They’ve found exactly jack shit. 

“Don’t be so pessimistic, Rich,” keeps telling him Mike. “You told us that you felt like _something_ was there with you in Neibolt—and I believe you, I do. If that something has been in Derry long enough, it’s bound to pop up somewhere in these books. We gotta keep looking.”  
“You just like playing librarian,” Richie responds, every time, but gets back to reading all the same. 

Ben and Bill join them after a few hours, and Richie uses it as an excuse to take a break and stretch his legs. 

He’s studying the contents of the vending machine near the main door, trying to pick between stale chips and stale Doritos, when someone walks up next to him.  
“Hi, Richie,” the someone says. 

Connor Bowers. He recognizes him by his voice even before Richie’s head whips around to see him ordering a coffee on the other vending machine.  
Just the name _Bowers_ makes his flight or fight instinct kick in, especially after the bathroom incident where he…oh, what was it that happened? Ah, yes: he almost got fucking killed. 

He forces himself to relax, because after all, Henry being insane doesn’t mean that every member of his family shares the same affliction. “Uh, hi,” he chokes out.  
Connor smiles shyly at him. 

Here’s the thing about Connor.  
They’ve never been friends—rarely even talked, really—but Derry is a small town, and for virtue of the fact that they were born the same year, Richie has known him since first grade.  
Here’s another thing about Connor.  
He’s pretty. Richie remembers thinking this for the first time when he was thirteen, with the sort of dawning sense of horror that had nothing to do Connor himself, and more with the fact that he wasn’t one of the girls with pigtails and skirts Richie was supposed to like.  
It became a dull throb after a while, never developing in nothing more than aesthetic appreciation—and Richie had bigger problems at the time anyway. The crush he had on Bill, just to name one.  
Those sure were an agonizing few months of his life, weren’t they? Thankfully one day Bill’s mom forced him to get an atrocious bowl cut and things sorted themselves out. 

_Would Eddie look bad with a bowl cut?_ Richie thinks. He pictures it: still cute. _Goddamnit._

“Are you here to study for the English test?” Connor asks him, oblivious to the meandering trajectory of Richie’s thoughts. 

“Technically yes, but my friends and I got caught up in a, uh, project. So no, I guess, we’re not—” He clears his throat, feeling stupid in his baggy t-shirt with _Surf Naked_ printed boldly on the front. “Studying, not really. Sorry.”  
‘ _Sorry’? Why the fuck—_

Connor just smiles again, either ignoring or not picking up on the aura of awkwardness that Richie’s choking on. “If you change your mind, you can join me,” he says, and he points to a small table with a bunch of textbooks piled on. “Have fun with your project.”  
Connor takes his coffee, and with a soft _bye_ he leaves a dumbfounded Richie standing stock-still in front of the vending machine. 

⛦⛦⛦ 

The small interaction seems to open a dam. 

Well, it does for Connor. Richie doesn’t even notice for a few days, his head too full of college applications, painting lessons, and _Eddie_ to have space for much else.  
He soon catches on, though. Richie has more classes in common with Connor than he thought, and the other boy always looks up and smiles at him when they first see each other in the morning and tries to start a conversation with Richie whenever he can. 

Connor never approaches him when one of the Losers is around, reserving for him only glances and fleeting smiles whenever Richie is chatting with Stan and Bev or eating lunch with Bill.  
Richie gets it, though. The secretiveness. The fear of being caught red-handed even if the most you’re doing is exchanging a few words with a possible friend. 

Fuck, is he even reading things right? The truth is, Richie’s so desperate to not be the only fucking queer in town that he could be making all this up. 

Maybe Connor truly just wants to make new friends, and class-clown Tozier seemed to him like the perfect, most approachable candidate.  
_But no_ , Richie thinks, chewing on his pen cap as Professor Jones drones on about Of Mice And Men, _that can’t be it._ _  
_ You don’t go about making new friends by staring at their profile whenever you think they can’t see you—don’t think Richie hasn’t noticed his eyes on him, now that he’s really paying attention. It makes him want to grow his hair out even more, until the curls stretch under their weight and finally fall over Richie’s face to hide him. 

Maybe Connor’s playing a prank on him. That’s a real possibility. 

Richie with his stupid glasses. Richie whose buck teeth still show whenever he smiles even after years of wearing braces. Richie who wears obnoxiously bright colors because he wants to dress for the part of the clown he’s picked for himself. Richie who proudly calls himself a Loser, and who everybody knows not to change in front of after P.E. because he _sux flamer cock_ , apparently, even if he’s never even held hands with a boy before, and God forbid they catch the gay from him or something. 

Pretty, golden-haired Connor is still a Bowers after all. More sane and level-headed than Henry, that much is obvious, but it’s not difficult for Richie to imagine a scenario where he’s tricked into thinking he’s safe just to have the rug pulled from under his feet. Connor could hurt him with a well-placed word, no need to involve any knives. 

So Richie keeps thinking about it, the possibilities and the risks and the terrifying notion that Connor might actually, simply, genuinely _like_ him.  
The thought keeps him distracted when he tries to study, or painting over one of his mom’s old stuffed dolls to test his skills, or putting together that mixtape he promised Bev.

_What to do, what to do…_

As if it even matters. It’s not Connor who Richie craves to see every minute they have to spend apart, and it’s not Connor whose attention, when fully on him, sets him on fire. It’s certainly not Connor that Richie was thinking about last night, as he gave in all those feelings that take residence in his head and in his guts every time he’s in the silence of his room, and slipped a hand inside his boxers. He kept quiet, face buried in his pillow—and it was not the first time it heard him gasp words of love meant for someone else, but it was the first time Richie came shuddering in his fist right after. 

Why pretend, then? That he cares, that it matters, that Richie’s normal enough to get a crush on a nice boy who may like him back, instead of a self-proclaimed _miracle of engineering_ who calls Richie an idiot and wears his faded shirts even if they’re too big for him and scares the shit out of him when he gets lost in his thoughts and stays immobile like a _thing_ would. 

Might as well satiate Connor’s fascination with him, and make a bet with himself about how fast it will fade once he gets to know him. That ought to solve Richie’s problem, right?

He’s thinking this when, few days later, Connor asks him if he wants to _like, maybe go to the Arcade one of these days? There’s a new Street Fighter game they could play together._ _  
_ Richie smiles, and fixes his glasses up his nose, and says _for sure, dude._

They make plans to go the next week.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, got'em! I tricked you all into thinking this was a Reddie fic. Connor/Richie was endgame all along! No, wait, please don't unsubscribe, I have three children to feed--
> 
> [Fanart](https://reddieforakiss.tumblr.com/post/620105738806870016/bev-smiles-and-leans-back-on-her-elbows) by @reddieforakiss | [Alternative link](https://archive.org/details/dadoes-artwork-by-reddieforakiss-chapter-four)


	5. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You want me,” says Richie, slowly like he’s talking to a toddler, or like he has a concussion, which at least would explain why he’s acting so weird today. “To gently blow on your neck? Like, with my mouth?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @every dog person reading: i'm sorry for one (1) specific line in this chapter
> 
> (Again, warning for homophobia. Nothing graphic, just Bowers being Bowers)

_September 27th, 1993_

Richie’s always been self-destructive.

Every other kid, if presented with glasses too big for their faces and proud professors who openly compliment their grades in class, would have sagely decided to lay low and make themself as invisible as possible.

Not Richie. Richie was thirteen and saw the irritation towards his very existence in the eyes of older, meaner guys and decided to turn the dial up to eleven. Wear bright colors and ridiculous Hawaiian shirts. Laugh loud, make everyone else laugh even louder. Run when they chase you, but be the first one to invite them to punch you right in the face if they catch you, do it even through the braces that give you a lisp and feel too big for your mouth. 

Then go home, when you can, proud of your broken nose or the slurs they threw your way. Hug your parents, call the Losers, calm down your racing heart. 

Thinking back to it, maybe this reckless way of living hasn’t served Richie well. He should consider acting with even a hint of self-preservation one of these days. 

It becomes exceptionally obvious when Richie finally kills Connor’s character in Street Fighter, and, still grinning at the victory, extends his open hand to Connor to get another token.  
Their fingers brush, even curl around each other for a brief second, and sick satisfaction washes over Richie when he feels _nothing_. Sure, touching someone, even so innocently, is nice—but, but…

But Eddie yesterday stood behind Richie and leaned his weight on his back, arms draped over Richie’s shoulders, and peered down at what Richie was reading all bunched up in his chair. Richie had become aware of his own body down to the _bones_ —he could feel how the ridges of his vertebrae dug into Eddie’s body from chest to hips through his thin shirt. It might have been the layer of clothing between them, but Eddie felt softer that he’d remembered, softer than the metal Richie knows is still hidden underneath ( _is it still there, though?_ ). Warmer, too.  
It had been enough to make his pants too tight, and thank God in his hands was a battered copy of _The Neverending Story_ he could use to cover himself.

Having Eddie purposefully touch his hand, and linger there, like Connor is doing right now, would probably kill him on the spot.

Richie has just enough time to feel bad for accepting his invite and leading him on before shit hits the fan. 

He can’t say that he’s surprised. After all, accepting to go out with a _Bowers_ in a very public place like the Arcade, no matter how easy it would be to justify it as just two friends hanging out, had been nothing more than another occasion to test his luck. Letting Connor stand too close to him, or their eyes meet for far longer than platonically necessary, was just the nail on the coffin. 

“Another round?” he asks, holding up the token. He watches Connor’s eyes dart behind Richie’s shoulder and his smile fade out.  
“Dude, stop being weird,” Connor says, loud enough to attract the attention of all the other kids around them. “I said that I have to go.”  
Richie frowns, confused. "You never said— _what?_ ”  
“I’m not your fucking boyfriend,” he says, disgust painting itself over his boyish features as he puts some distance between them. Richie hates being so bemused that he can’t even think of anything to say—but not as much as he hates _Henry_ ’ voice speaking up from behind him.  
At least it explains Connor’s sudden change of mood. 

Richie turns around. Henry is slowly walking towards him, looking so hateful it ages him several decades; the other people in the Arcade stay silent, no one dares to move.  
“Are you bothering my little cousin, Tozier?” asks Henry.  
Richie clenches his jaw and doesn’t answer.  
It must irritate Bowers beyond reason, because in a moment he loses all his composure. “Get the fuck out, faggot!” he yells, almost _growl_ s, and the way he flashes him his teeth reminds Richie of the cruel bite of metal on skin. 

Richie doesn’t have to be asked twice. 

He walks out of the Arcade without even a glance at Connor, which is the biggest act of disdain he can afford at the moment. Soon enough he’s running down the streets as fast as his legs will allow, taking random corners until he ends up in the deserted alley behind Mr. Keene’s pharmacy.  
He stops to catch his breath. He even considers punching the brick wall as an outlet for his frustration, but he already sunk low enough today, and he has no interest in breaking his hand on top of everything else. 

He realizes that he’s still shaking and close to crying. Will Richie ever get over how people can just spit words at his face, and have them hurt him like a punch to the gut?  
Fuck Bowers. Fuck the whole Bowers family. Fuck this shitty, hell-hole of a town—he can’t wait to go to college with his friends, to leave all of this behind and come back only to visit his parents or, better yet, fucking have _them_ come to, to sunny L.A. or whenever he’s gonna end up—

“Richie?”

Richie stops rubbing a hand over his eyes—he's not crying, fuck you—and puts his glasses back on. Connor is walking towards him, panting as much as Richie is.  
“Why the fuck did you follow me?” he asks, and he embraces the anger burning up inside him because the alternative is the frostbite of sadness.  
Connor has the decency to look mortified. “I’m sorry, Rich, I didn’t mean—”  
Richie has a flash of Eddie smiling at him and using the same nickname. “You don’t get to call me that!” he yells, “you don’t get to call me anything, _Bowers._ ”

He spits it out like an insult, which is the only treatment that name deserves. Connor flinches back, but Richie is blinded by hurt, and he has no intention of letting him get away with the danger he put him in that easily. 

He’s not a dog. He will not cower when he gets beaten and abused, make himself smaller and accept his fate. No, Richie’s a _cat—_ and he’s hissing, he’s feral, he’ll lash out and scratch at whoever has the misfortune of hurting him or, god forbid, one of the Losers.  
“Why the _fuck_ did you do that, huh?” he asks, walking towards Connor until they’re nose to nose. “Aren’t we supposed to stick together, even _protect_ each other?”  
“What do you mean, ‘we’?”  
Richie shoves him back but grasps at his shirt before he can fall on his ass. “Us _faggots_ , Connor, us _queers_. That’s what I fucking meant.”  
Connor goes pale and diverts his eyes. “I’m not, I mean—”  
“Just shut the fuck up, man,” Richie interrupts him. The fight is quickly leaving his body, he feels more tired than ever in his life. “I don’t—I don’t understand why you couldn’t just walk away when you saw your fucking cousin coming in. I would have gotten the hint!”  
“You say it like it’s so fucking _easy,_ man!” Connor chokes out, his eyes going red and watery. “I fucking panicked, ok? You don’t know what it’s like having to deal with Henry—”  
Richie scoffs, unbelieving. “ _I don’t know?_ Your cousin has been beating me up since middle school, he almost fucking _killed me_ just the other day—”  
“Then you can understand why I reacted that way! I was just trying to protect myself, Richie, wouldn’t you have done the same?”  
“No, fuck you,” Richie cries, “I wouldn’t have asked a guy for, for a _date_ and the humiliated him in front of _everyone,_ put him in _danger_ —”

Connor kisses him.  
It’s more of a painful clash of teeth, he does it so hard, grasping at the lapels of Richie’s shirt to tug him down. Richie tastes blood in his mouth, and the salt of tears running down both of their faces.  
It lasts only few seconds, just enough for Richie to understand what’s going on and pull back. 

There’s some irony in the fact that his first kiss with a guy made him bleed—too bad that he doesn’t have the time to craft a joke about it. 

“What the fuck was _that_?” he asks, hissing at the sting of his split lip.  
“I, I don’t,” Connor stutters, “you said we have to stick together—”  
“It doesn’t mean we have to be together, or that I want to fucking— _kiss you_. What, just, just because you’re the only other gay guy in this fucking town it has to mean that I want to _fuck you_? Or _be_ with you?”  
“You did say yes when I asked you out,” Connor protests, but it’s clear he doesn’t believe his own argument.  
“And look where that fucking got me,” laughs Richie, no hint of humour, and he revels in the way Connor looks horrified at the blood staining his teeth. Suits him right— _he_ did this. 

There’s a tense moment of silence where Richie can feel the blood ringing in his ears, the furious beat of his heart. He’s still so angry he’s shaking with it—he imagines Stan gathering him in his arms like when they were kids and Richie was always full of frantic energy; he thinks of the calming tone of his voice, the soft feeling of his cotton shirts under his cheek. Richie manages to take a deep breath, and relaxes marginally. 

“Let’s make a deal,” he says. “I forget any of this ever happened, and you forget that I even exist.”  
Connor is still looking to the side, eyes wide and steadily leaking tears under the blond curls of his bangs. “Yeah, that might be for the best,” he admits, voice small. 

Richie wipes again at his mouth, barely noticing the dull throb of pain. He thinks of maybe leaving Connor on better terms, of what Bill would do in the same situation, but decides against it—he just walks away, wishing he was already safe in his childhood bed, or better yet, cuddled up with someone on a hammock underground. 

⛦⛦⛦ 

Eddie presses an open palm to his naked torso, and softly scratches his nails over the layer of skin.

He hisses at the sensation, and then lets out a breathless laugh. He _felt_ it. He’s not supposed to feel anything, but he _did_ , and it’s not the barely-there sting of when he tried to do the same a week or so ago. It _hurts._

Something about Eddie is changing. It’s been a slow-going process, and not one he understands how to control or speed up, but the results are there, clear as day—he can move more easily, no need to drip lubricant oil where his gears used to get jammed; the sutures that keep the ceramic panels glued together are barely visible anymore; and the silicone layer of synthetic skin somehow spread from his face and hands down the length of his body. 

_You mean down the_ shortness _of your body_ , he imagines Richie saying. The thought makes him smile, another thing that comes more natural to him now than when he first woke up in Ben’s shed. 

Richie, with his loud mouth and his chipped black nail polish and his effortless charm.  
He has no idea what Richie does to him every time he smiles and seems to catch all the light in the room; what power he holds over Eddie that could make everything rattle in the cavity of his chest until he has to sit down and let himself tremble. Even before he could sense the bite of cold or the warmth of human skin, all Richie needed to do was say a particularly stupid joke and peer at him through thick-rimmed glasses and Eddie would feel as human as anyone else, in all its terrifying intensity. 

He wonders if that’s normal. None of the other Losers seem to have the same reaction to Richie just being Richie. 

Eddie passes a hand through his hair, a habit he has picked up from Beverly, and shakes his head. Worrying about _feelings_ and their _meaning_ is exhausting—he has no idea how everyone else just deals with them, all the fucking time, with no reprieve—and he’s done that enough for today.  
Between school and tutoring and house chores, all his new friends were too busy today to come spend some time with him, so he’s been left alone with his thoughts for many long hours. He doesn’t blame any of them for leaving him alone (Richie especially, he tries to convince himself, who’s hanging out with some boy Eddie’s never heard of before, which is _fine),_ and if he’s being honest he’s starting to feel like a burden. He can’t go into town, because, despite all the changes, a close look could still tell you that he’s not human, so all the others are forced to come all the way to the Clubhouse to spend time with him.  
And with the change of seasons it’s starting to get too cold to comfortably spend hours in a hole in the ground—a fact he’s reminded of every night, when the temperature drops and Eddie starts to shiver. 

At first, the novelty of it was enough to make it bearable, but that wore off pretty fast. 

Speaking of getting cold—he should probably put a shirt back on. He takes the box where he keeps all the clothes the Losers have gifted him from under the wooden table and starts looking for something soft and warm to wear. He finds a hoodie with a ridiculous print on the front: a weird, furry creature playing a keyboard with _GREMLINS_ proudly written in bold red. It’s so obviously something that only Richie would wear that Eddie presses it to his face and grins like a fool into the fabric. 

He’s about to slip it on when the hatch opens with a creak, and two bright blue sneakers come down the ladder.  
Eddie recognises them immediately. “Richie,” he says, even before the mess of dark curls is visible.  
“Hi, Eddie,” Richie greets him. There’s something forced to the cheeriness of his tone, and Eddie is immediately worried.  
“What’s going on? Aren’t you supposed to be at the Arcade?”  
“You’re not happy to see me, Spaghedward? I’m deeply wounded,” he jokes as he jumps down to skip the last few steps, still facing away from Eddie. “I come _aaall_ the way here to visit, and you…uuuh.”  
He trails off when he turns around and his eyes fall on Eddie, still on his knees in front of the box. “Why are you shirtless?”

“I was changing,” Eddie explains with a shrug. He doesn’t understand why Richie has to look so horrified, it’s not like he hasn’t worked on repairing his chest for weeks before Eddie woke up—he has seen him in worse states than this, but the way Richie pales and looks away makes him feel...self-conscious? Is that the right word?  
Then he gets a good look at Richie’s face, notices how his bottom lip is swollen and redder than normal, and that seems much more important than Eddie not wearing a shirt. “What happened to your mouth?”  
“You, uh—your paint. It’s scratched in some places,” Richie changes the subject. He points at his own chest with a vague gesture of his ringed hand.  
Eddie looks down, and sure enough there are white scratches on his skin. He must have done some damage before. He doesn’t like Richie’s non-answer, but he’ll let it slide. For now. “Oh. I’ll ask Bev if she can fix it next time I see her.”

“Wait,” Richie says, looking even more nervous than before. _What is going on with him?_ thinks Eddie, frowning at the fake smile he’s being served. “Do you want me to do it?”  
“Uh?”  
“Painting over that. Do you want me to do it?”  
“You never told me you knew how,” says Eddie, still holding the stupid hoodie to keep his hands busy. The idea of Richie touching his naked, newly-sensitive skin is as appealing as troubling.  
“A man’s gotta keep his secrets,” comments Richie in an unnaturally deep voice, one Eddie sees fit for the Batman of the comics Bill brought him a couple of weeks ago.  
“Well, fuckface, as long as you don’t paint me neon green I don’t mind you doing it instead of Bev.”

(' _Wouldn’t mind._ ’ Understatement of the century—and Eddie would know, he’s existed for most of it.) 

Richie grins, taking the insult for what it is: an opportunity to fall into familiar banter, something to make him relax. Eddie has no idea what happened to make him so shaky and nervous, but he’s set on fixing it.  
“I wear glasses but I’m not colorblind, Eds.”  
“Could have fooled me,” he deadpans, standing from his crouched position to sit on top of the table where Bev usually does her magic. “Considering how you dress.”  
“ _These_ ,” Richie says, showing off his outfit with a pose, “are deliberate choices, because I have _free will._ Ever heard of it, you _soulless machine_?”  
“How’s this for a deliberate choice?” he says as soon as Richie’s close enough, and kicks him in the shin.  
“Ouch! You _fucker_ ,” Richie exclaims, but he’s laughing and already reaching for the paints and the little plastic plate where he can mix the colors. “First law of robotics: a robot may _not_ injure a human. Jot that down in your fancy cursive, asshole.”  
“Lucky me then, I’m not a robot so I can kick you all I want.”  
“You’re right, robots are amoral and you’re obviously too mean-spirited to fall under that category.”  
Eddie giggles, leaning his head on Richie’s shoulder for a brief second as he creates the right shade of pink for Eddie’s skin. “No, that’s not why I’m not a robot,” he explains. “I can feel stuff now, like temperature or the texture of what I touch—even pain.”  
Richie looks up at him, looking shocked and ecstatic. “Dude, _what_? No way!”  
“Yes way! I—well, it’s been like this for a while actually,” he says, feeling flustered under Richie’s unfaltering eye contact. “I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure the feelings wouldn’t just disappear after a few days. But that’s why I’m not wearing a shirt, I was…I guess, testing how sensitive my skin is?”  
Richie’s eyes glass over, and when he says “Sensitive?” it’s with a tone of voice Eddie’s never heard him use before.  
“Yeah? I don’t have a basis for comparison, though.” And before he can think it through, he adds: “Can you help me test it?”  
“Test it?”  
Eddie sighs, frowning at Richie. “You just gonna repeat everything I say, asshole?” he says, and pushes Richie’s glasses up his nose because the idiot won’t do it himself and not seeing his eyes properly is driving Eddie insane.  
That seems to snap him out of whatever trance he fell in. “What? No. I mean, no to the repeating, yes to the helping you with seeing how—sensitive you are, or whatever. What did you have in mind?”

Eddie thinks for a second what would be the best way to go about this. “Touching would be useless, because I could feel the pressure of it even before. You could, uh, blow on me?”  
A shocked sputter on Richie’s part. “Fucking _pardon_?”  
“What’s so shocking about that, dickwad? Just gently blow on my face—no, not my face, I would hear the sound of it. My neck maybe?”  
“You want me,” says Richie, slowly like he’s talking to a toddler, or like he has a concussion, which at least would explain why he’s acting so weird today. “To gently blow on your neck? Like, with my mouth?”  
“If this is leading up to a fart joke, I will definitely break that first law of robotics and kill you with my bare hands.”  
“Pffh, as if you have the core strength for that. You’re as skinny as a Dickensian orphan begging for more soup.” 

Oh, Eddie will _not_ let that one slide.  
Sonia was always worried he could break in a million pieces at every wrong move, and those ideas still swim around in his mind, sometimes so overwhelming he has to lay on the solid ground of the Clubhouse and stay perfectly immobile until the catastrophic visions of his limbs falling off his body one by one fade away.  
But other times, he’s found the courage to test his limits. He just has to think of Richie holding him tight and cheering him on when he took those first steps, the very first day he came to life, and suddenly he’s not so scared anymore. 

And this is what he’s learned about himself: he may be turning more human-looking as time passes, but inside he’s still solid metal and excellent engineering—which means, _he’s stronger than he looks._  
So he hops off the table, so close to Richie that his nose almost touches his chest, and bends his knees just enough to snake both arms around Richie’s thighs.  
“What the hell—wait, don’t, _oh my God.”_

Richie screeches when his feet leave the ground, and he puts both hands on Eddie’s shoulders like that could help him not fall on his ass if Eddie was having problems holding his weight.  
Eddie has to look straight up to catch his eyes, but it’s worth the look of absolute terror, delight, and something else he can’t decipher he sees on Richie’s face. “Apologize for calling me a Dickensian orphan or I won’t put you down.”  
“Eddie, what the fuck,” Richie says, breathless. He tightens his grip around Richie’s legs for purely selfish reasons. “I’m sorry I compared you to Oliver Twist. From now on, the only analogies will be with buffed men in anime and sitcoms from the 80’s, I swear. You gonna let me down or ask for my lunch money first?”  
Eddie huffs a laugh, his face pressed to Richie’s stomach, before carefully setting him down. 

He sits back on the table, happy that he officially won one of their stupid arguments, instead of forgetting what they were bickering about in the first place or getting told to _shut the fuck up_ by one of the Losers.  
“So?” he says, thoroughly enjoying being _smug_.  
“What?”  
“Are you going to blow on my neck anytime soon or do I have to recruit someone else?”  
Richie shakes his head, still looking a bit unsure on his feet. “That’s a bizarre fucking sentence, Spaghetti—no, sorry, Spag-He-Man. _Ah!_ Did you get it?”  
“Absolutely not, but I’m sure it was not funny.”  
“Whatever,” huffs Richie, stepping between the open V of Eddie’s legs. “Close your eyes and tell me if you can feel this.”

Eddie, for once, does as he’s told.  
For a moment, he can’t feel anything—then there are curls brushing on his chin, and the warmth of a hand curling around his thigh. Richie’s silent, but close enough that Eddie can feel rivulets of his breath spill over his neck and drip down, over his naked chest, and it raises goosebumps over his arms like the first time he listened to Bohemian Rhapsody on Ben’s best earphones.  
He could stop Richie right there. Tell him that if he could feel all that, then the experiment might as well be over before it even starts. 

He doesn’t.  
He lets Richie finally gently blow on a spot under his jaw, and he wishes fervently that he would press his lips there as well so he could feel the softness; bite him there to show him the pain, soothe it with his tongue and with a kiss and with all those other secret, terrible things he’s read about in books and magazines and wants, so bad, to understand completely. 

But Richie pulls back after a few seconds. “What’s the verdict, then?” he asks, and Eddie is so shaken by the intensity of his own thoughts that at first he has no idea what he’s talking about.  
“Uh? Oh, yeah, I felt that,” he manages to say. He touches the spot under his jaw where he felt Richie’s breath. “Right here?”  
Richie nods. “I guess all my jokes about you being a Real Boy are turning into reality, then. You’re welcome, Eds.”  
“You don’t get to take credit for any of this,” Eddie says, pointing an accusatory finger at his face. “And anyway, I doubt I’d still need to refresh my paint every week if that were the case.”  
“Is that a subtle way to tell me to get a move on and fix those scratches?”  
“I wouldn’t call it _subtle_.”

As an answer, Richie pretends to spill the paint he mixed all over Eddie’s pants—but then he gets to work, hunched over the damaged area and focused like a surgeon during a particularly difficult operation.  
After he finds the perfect color match to the rest of Eddie’s skin, the painting part is a quick affair. Eddie’s so fixated on Richie’s hand, pressed to keep his balance where Eddie’s heartbeat should be, that he almost forgets to pry on the glaring issue of his split lip.  
“Rich,” he says, “Can you tell me what happened to your mouth? And don’t change the subject.”  
Richie rolls his eyes. “So _pushy._ Nothing happened, I just accidentally bit myself.”  
“Wow, I’m impressed. You’re as bad a liar as you are a comedian.”  
“Shut up,” he groans, with no bite to it, “I argued with a guy, alright? Connor, the one I went to the Arcade with. We had a—disagreement.”  
Eddie brushes his foot on Richie’s leg as silent comfort. “Did he punch you?”  
“Ah, I wish,” he scoffs, shaking his head. His black curls fall over his eyes, hiding them from Eddie. “Don’t worry about it, dude, I already feel better.”  
“Yeah?”  
“Of course,” Richie says. “I’m here with you, no? Got my daily dose of Spaghetti, and now I’m better than ever.”

When Eddie tells him to _fuck off and find a better nickname,_ Richie grins, wide and sincere for the first time today, and it’s enough to light up the whole Clubhouse. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone stop them, THEY'RE GOING FERAL!!!


	6. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re fucking cold, man,” he mumbles, still half asleep. “The wallet could have waited until tomorrow, dumbass.” He rubs his thumb over Eddie’s knuckles, tugs him closer until Eddie crashes on his chest.  
> “Why the hug?” he asks, but still melts into it, wishing there weren’t so many layers between them, that he could feel Richie’s heartbeat and pretend it was his own.  
> “‘Cause you’re cold,” Richie says, pressing closer, “and ‘m sleepy. I wanna cuddle when I’m sleepy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy belated Valentine's day! I hope you guys enjoy the chapter <3

_October 10th, 1993_

Eddie stares at the driver’s license held up before his eyes and shivers.

The two are not related. He shivers because it’s the middle of the night during a particularly severe Maine autumn, and whatever brought Eddie to life saw it fit that he started feeling coldness right as the harsh season rolled in. And he stares at the driver license because, well—it’s Richie’s. 

Eddie was idly scribbling on a new notebook Bev gifted him, trying to get his penmanship back to the glory of his days as a writing automaton (a page had already been filled with _Trashmouth Tozier_ in a cursive as curly as Richie’s hair), when he saw a wallet hiding under a stack of comics.   
Richie had been moaning about losing it all damn day, the dumbass.   
Eddie picked it up, pretended he didn’t want to snoop, did it anyway, and now he’s been staring at Richie’s face on the driver license for the past ten minutes.

That’s a lie. Eddie’s not staring at his stupid, frog-like, gorgeous face—he’s staring at his address.

Consider these three factors: Eddie’s cold; Eddie misses Richie despite having seen him not five hours earlier; Eddie has both his address _and_ a map of Derry that Ben had brought to the Clubhouse a couple of weeks ago with the same enthusiasm of a cartographer who discovered a new land. 

He could layer on the warmest clothes he has at hand and ponder for the rest of the night why the fuck his teeth are chattering if he still has no muscles— _or_ , he could take the map, find his way to Richie’s house, and sneak into his bedroom before the rest of Derry wakes up. 

For a second, he can hear Sonia’s voice whisper in his ear that he will get lost in the Barrens and that rust will eat him whole before someone finds him. “Shut up, _shut up_ ,” he mumbles to himself, already unpinning the map from the wall where it’s displayed.   
He puts on a beanie and the biggest scarf he has (red, one of Mike’s), trying to hide most of his face in case someone sees him, and leaves the safety of the Clubhouse for the endless dark of the outside world. 

The Barrens are scary at night. It’s pitch black, and Eddie can hear animals scuttering away from the weak light of his flashlight—he finds that he remembers easily the way back to town, despite having passed through there only once on the back of Richie’s bike. Maybe it’s impressed into his memory because Richie almost hit a tree several times, who knows?  
After half an hour of stumbling through the woods, Eddie’s feet finally hit the gravel of Kansas Street’s roadside; from there, it’s another twenty minutes of squinting at the map and praying to whoever’s listening that no one catches him, alone and with three different hoodies on to keep warm. 

It must be some time after three when he gets to Richie’s house. 

The fallacies in his plan become painfully obvious. What’s he gonna do, now that he’s here? Ring the bell and wait for one of Richie’s parents to open the door and let him in?  
He imagines what he would say.   
“Hello, I’m just one of Richie’s friends you’ve never seen before, please ignore the fact that my face is literally painted on and my hair is made of plastic, I’m here to ask: can I sleep in your son’s bed?”   
Yeah, that’s a no. 

Plan B. Maybe there’s a back door, and maybe he’s lucky enough to find it open...or maybe he can get in from a window.  
What was that story Bill and Stan told him once…? Something about Richie almost breaking his leg when he jumped from his bedroom window as a kid, all to prove that an open umbrella could, in fact, slow down his fall. (It hadn’t.)   
“Thank God I convinced him to try from the window instead on the roof, at least he fell only from the second floor,” Stan explained, shaking his head like a disappointed father. Richie cackled loudly and planted a wet kiss on Stan’s cheek.

So: second story, then, and somewhere on the back of the house because not even Richie is stupid enough to jump in the middle of the trafficked street. 

Eddie sneaks in the backyard with ease, and finds that only two windows fit the right description, but no detail tells him which one leads to Richie. He’ll have to chance it.   
Eddie almost weeps in joy when he sees a ladder leaning against the trunk of a tall tree—he’s pretty sure he actually can’t produce tears, but still, the thought is there.   
Careful not to trip on the cut branches scattered on the ground near it, or the heavy-looking pair of gardening scissors laying in the middle, Eddie takes the ladder and brings it under the window on the far left.   
_Please be Richie’s room, please be Richie’s room,_ he thinks as he carefully goes up the steps, hands rigid from the cold air and Richie’s wallet burning a hole in his back pocket. 

He gets high enough that he can peek inside the room if he strains his neck.   
There’s a gap between the curtains, and from it Eddie spies a wall full of band posters, a pile of clothes hastily thrown on a chair, and two legs half-covered by the bed sheets. 

Eddie smiles and mentally high-fives himself. Unless Richie’s father is also a teenager with god-awful taste in fashion, this must be the right room.

He knocks on the glass once, twice, three times before Richie even gives a sign of being still alive. By the fifth knock, he’s finally sitting up on the bed and leaning closer to the window until the mess of his hair comes in sight. Eddie waits for him to finish putting on his glasses, and then he’s waving at him and pointing to the window hatch.  
There are several moments of pure panic on Richie’s face, when he must think that Eddie, only his eyes visible between beanie and scarf, is a very dumb burglar who knocks instead of breaking in—then he’s scrambling out of bed, and opening the window.

“E _ds?_ ” Richie whispers, caught between happy and confused. “How the hell did you get here?”   
Eddie takes his offered hand and lets himself be hauled inside the room. He’s immediately relieved at the change in temperature. “I walked.”   
“You _walked_? But, why?”   
“To bring you this,” Eddie explains, lying only a little, and fishes out of his back pocket Richie’s wallet to hand it to him.   
Richie takes a second to turn on his lamp, and the warm light washes over his tangled hair and the pillow lines on his face. His glasses are askew, already falling down the long line of his nose. Eddie fixes them for him, and when he accidentally touches his cheekbone Richie hisses, and takes the hand in his free one. “You’re fucking _cold_ , man,” he mumbles, still half asleep. “The wallet could have waited until tomorrow, dumbass.” He rubs his thumb over Eddie’s knuckles, tugs him closer until Eddie crashes on his chest.   
“Why the hug?” he asks, but still melts into it, wishing there weren’t so many layers between them, that he could feel Richie’s heartbeat and pretend it was his own.   
“‘Cause you’re cold,” Richie says, pressing closer, “and ‘m sleepy. I wanna cuddle when I’m sleepy.”   
Eddie smiles in Richie’s shoulder. “So, you don’t mind if I sleep with you?”   
Richie freezes, and when he whispers “What?” he sounds way more awake.

For the first time, Eddie considers that perhaps this whole thing was a bad idea; that Richie doesn’t want him in his bedroom, let alone in his bed. He should have just stayed in the Clubhouse and shivered the night away there instead of putting himself in danger just to get here and force Richie to find a gentle way to tell him to fuck off. 

“I didn’t mean—I didn’t think this through, Rich, I’m sorry,” he stutters, leaning back from the hug before Richie can do it himself.  
“What? No, Eddie, wait a second.” Richie pushes his fingers under the lens of glasses to rub at his eyes. “Fuck, my brain is still on sleep mode. How did you get here, anyway?”   
“Your driver’s license had your address on it. And I had a map of Derry.” He pats the front pocket of his hoodie, where the map is carefully folded.   
“God, you’re such a boy scout,” Richie laughs, voice still low enough not to wake his parents. “But, like, why did you come here in the middle of the night? You gave me a heart attack when I saw you out there, hovering like a fucking owl.”   
“Owls don’t hover.”   
Richie blinks. “Well,” he says, raising an eyebrow, “if they’re flying but kind of not moving at the same time—oh, _shut up_ , we’re not talking about this right now.”   
“ _You_ started it,” Eddie argues, still whispering in the dim light of the room.   
“Eddie. Please just answer?”   
“I wanted to bring you your wallet,” he repeats, fully expecting the unimpressed look Richie shoots his way. “Okay, I was cold. And I didn’t know where else to go.”

Richie sighs, and his shoulders drop in an exhausted slouch. “Jesus Christ, Eddie,” he says, sounding as miserable as Eddie feels. “You should have told us something! What the fuck, man, I don’t want you to—that’s fucked up, that you were all alone freezing to death. Get under the covers.”  
Eddie would breathe a sigh of relief if he had lungs. “Really?”   
“Yes, fucking really, dumbass. I’ll warm you up.”

Eddie lets himself be pushed towards the edge of the bed, where he gratefully sits. The sheets are warm and soft under his hands, the pillows plush when he lays down on his back.  
He takes a moment to toe off his shoes, but as he tries to get under the covers Richie wraps his long fingers around his ankle. “Where do you think you’re going?”   
“Uh, under the—I thought—”   
“Relax, dude,” Richie laughs softly. “I already told you you can stay in my bed. Like duh, what am I gonna do, make you sleep in the bathtub? You dummy.”   
“Don’t insult me,” protests Eddie, but it comes out slurred. The second his head hit the pillow, a wave of exhaustion had washed over him, and he’s seconds away from collapsing.   
Richie bullies him into sitting up, his touch still gentle when he ruffles his hair. “You call me _fuckface_ like that’s my God-given name, but I can’t call you a dummy? ” he says, and grabs at Eddie’s hoodies until he gets the hint and tiredly raises his arms, letting him tug all three of them up and away.   
Eddie accepts the clean shirt Richie’s handing him, struggling to keep awake. He didn’t even know he could feel like this—sleep until now has taken hours lying with his eyes closed on the hammock, waiting to be lost enough in his thoughts that he would experience a sort of time skip to morning. Right now, Eddie’s struggling to follow the conversation.   
“You can’t call me a dummy because it’s _racist_ ,” Eddie mumbles back. “Only _I_ can call me a dummy.”   
Richie huffs a laugh. “Oh, yeah, sure—what’s the acceptable term, then? Mannequin?”   
“The acceptable term is _go fuck yourself_.”

He finally gets under the covers, and, eyelids heavy, he snuggles closer to the pillow. The part of his subconscious that’s still paying attention to his surroundings hears Richie do the same, feels the heat of his long body curl up on the other side of the bed.   
“Two can play this game,” Richie says, and his voice is trailing off in a sleepy slur. “Telling me to go fuck myself is—it’s homophobic, that’s what it is.”   
Eddie frowns, struggling to follow the conversation. God, he’s _so_ tired. “What does...what?”   
“What? Nothing, it doesn’t matter. Shut up.”

Eddie fights sleep long enough to feel Richie’s fingers brush against his outstretched hand, and then he promptly loses the battle. 

⛦⛦⛦ 

_October 11th, 1993_

Richie opens his eyes to the blurry sight of someone sleeping next to him.

For a moment, he’s not aware of being awake and sinks his head deeper in the pillow, trying to bring the world around him into focus. If he squints a little to compensate for his terrible eyesight, Richie can almost distinguish the warm brown of Eddie’s hair, the shape of his arm resting on the covers.   
“Nice dream,” he mumbles to himself, voice rough with sleep. 

Then his brain gets with the program and gives Richie a useful summary of what happened last night. 

Not a dream, then—that’s the _real_ Eddie, in his bed, snuggled under his covers and soaking up their warmth.

Richie paws at the bedside table to find his glasses, unable and unwilling to shake off the haziness of early morning. He’d be freaking out about this, otherwise; like he’d be freaking out about the _that’s homophobic_ joke he made last night, almost outing himself to Eddie—Eddie who probably doesn’t even know that homosexuality is a _thing,_ or he wouldn’t go around touching Richie half as much as he does. 

He pushes the glasses up his nose. The room comes into sharp focus and so does the still-sleeping form of Eddie.   
Richie decides to be selfish, and a little creepy, and he stares at the way locks of hair fall over Eddie’s eyes, at the sliver of pure white teeth between his open lips.   
_Did his hair grow longer?_ Richie thinks, resisting the urge to brush it back from Eddie’s forehead. And then, because he’s secretly always been a sap, _God, he’s so fucking cute_. 

Cute, and in Richie’s bed. How many times has he fallen asleep thinking of this exact scenario?   
Eddie shifting closer to him in his sleep, one of his leg between Richie’s; waking up in the safe cocoon of his covers, where no one can see Richie angle his head to fit his profile in the curves of Eddie’s—and there’s something about the thought of their noses touching, of the tip of his resting on the gentle slope of Eddie’s cheekbone, that drives Richie wild, makes his insides liquefy in a puddle of _need_. Richie may know what kissing is like, but he has never felt the intimacy of someone who wants to slot all their pieces together, head to toe, who wants to to touch him for the simple joy of it. 

Eddie would complain about morning breath or something, and then kiss him anyway just to shut him up. Richie imagines the wet drag of their tongues, and how Eddie would push at his shoulders until he was laying on top, their shirts drawn up so their naked stomachs would press together. It would knock the air out of his lungs, feeling Eddie’s weight on him, his hips sliding between Richie’s open legs.   
Richie would sink his hands in Eddie’s hair, move them down until he could feel Eddie’s sharp jawline under his palms. Oh, how he loves that he’s bigger than Eddie, that the length of his fingers is just enough to wrap completely around his waist—and Richie wants to believe that Eddie would like it, too, that he would even moan into Richie’s mouth and let him swallow down the sound with a roll of his hips and a bite to his bottom lip.   
“Do you want me anyway?” Eddie would whisper when Richie lets the kiss break. “Even if I’m not like you?”   
And Richie for once in his life wouldn’t know what to say. How can he explain that, even when he dreams of this, Eddie still has teeth too white to be human, skin too smooth to be natural? He likes the thought of running his fingertips over the sutures where piece meets piece, so faint now compared to months ago. He likes that Eddie doesn’t need to breathe, that his eyes catch all the light like glass does, that he’s heavier than he looks and would press Richie deep into the mattress without effort, make him feel grounded and _real_. 

Richie wouldn’t know how to explain any of that, so he would just tug Eddie down to kiss him again, and let his body show how much he wants him.

Richie feels arousal pool in his stomach, and his dick fill in the sweatpants he uses as pajamas. God fucking dammit, why did he think fantasizing about making out with Eddie while he’s _right there_ was a good idea? He’s on a hair trigger on a good day, let alone when he’s still warm and loose from sleep. And now he _definitely_ can’t just jerk off and maybe cry about it when he’s done, so he needs a different solution, _stat_. 

_Okay, okay_ , he thinks, already humiliated just imagining Eddie catching him in this state. _What is it that people say, ‘close your eyes and think of England’?_ _  
_ Maybe that refers to something different, and it’s not like thinking of _England_ is helping any—Richie’s always found British accents pretty sexy, which is mostly why it’s one of his favourite Voices to do, but that’s neither here nor there now, is it? Ugh, _fuck_ , he should just roll off bed and take a cold—

“‘Morning.”

Richie whips his head to side to look at Eddie. He’s blinking himself awake. “I slept,” he announces, voice low. 

Richie clears his throat, and finds with relief that his panic at being caught is quickly killing his arousal. “Yeah, I noticed,” he says, hoping that his tone is the usual mix of insolence and humor. “What, you’ve never done that before?”  
Eddie just shakes his head. “Not properly.”   
“So you can finally answer the eternal question,” Richie quips.   
“What question?”   
“Do automata dream of electric spaghetti?” he finishes, and starts laughing at his dumb joke like the professional comedian he likes to think he is.   
Eddie just watches him, unimpressed, ruffled from sleep like a pissed off bird. “What the fuck does that mean.” The question mark remains only implied.   
“It's a reference to a book, chill out.”   
“Impressive. I didn’t know you could read.”   
“Wow, you’re mean in the morning,” Richie huffs, falling gratefully in the familiar banter. “Did you, though?”   
“Dream? No.” Eddie snuggles closer to his pillow, one of his feet knocking against Richie’s somewhere under the covers. He smiles ruefully. “I don't think I'm _that_ human.”   
“You look pretty human to me,” Richie says before he can stop himself. 

Eddie shakes his head. “No, no, there's still so many things...like this, look.” He grabs at Richie’s hand and guides it under the sheet until his palm is touching his side, where his ribs would be if he had any. It’s too close to something he had just been thinking about doing for comfort; he angles his hips far away from Eddie, just to be safe. “Push down.”  
“Uh?”   
“Just—push down with your fingers.”

Richie does. A soft _click_ filters from under the covers, and suddenly he can feel the raised edges of a removable panel. Eddie unwraps his fingers from Richie’s wrist and removes the panel and set it away. With a smile, he invites Richie to touch again: when he gingerly complies, he feels a series of buttons and small levers, cool and metallic, where skin was.   
“Oh, wow. That's freaky,” he mumbles. 

Eddie just giggles. “Always so _tactful_. You remember when I told you that Dr. Kaspbrak used those commands to tell me what to write? Back in the circus?”   
“Yeah, yeah, of course.”   
“Do you want to learn how?” Eddie says. There’s a glint in his eyes, like he’s sharing with Richie a big, exciting secret. It makes Richie smile, and fall for him a bit more. “You'd be the only person alive who knows how to activate me.”   
“I'd think an off button would me more useful, but yeah, Eds.” He waggles his eyebrows. “Tell me how I can turn you on.”   
“Shut up, dickwad,” Eddie laughs. “You’re ruining the moment. Just follow my lead, okay?”

He places Richie’s fingers on four specific buttons—the choice seems random to Richie, but Eddie doesn’t hesitate a moment. “One, one, three, zero,” he counts, and for each number he presses down two of their overlapped fingers. “The zero is that small lever on the side, can you…? Yeah, that one. That’s the first code you need to trigger the mechanism—well, _would_ have needed. It’s pretty useless now.”   
“One, one, three, zero. Is it a date, 30th of November?”

Eddie’s eyes unfocus in that way that Richie can’t stand to look at. “Yeah. Edward Kaspbrak’s birthday,” he explains, voice soft and face smoothed from any expression. “The real Edward Kaspbrak, I mean, I don’t even _have_ a birthday—”   
“Yes, you do, “ Richie interrupts him, knocking his knee against Eddie’s. He can’t bear it when Eddie gets lost somewhere in the past, goes all _distant_ like his presence here, with him, is but a momentary state and he’ll have to go back soon, _it’s been nice while it lasted, see ya never!_ “I remember the date of when you woke up. Woke _me_ up, actually. July 27th, that’s your birthday—we’ll throw a big party for it next year; music, gifts, underage drinking, the whole shebang.”

Eddie blinks twice, and he shifts his gaze back on him. Richie breathes a sigh of relief.   
“You would organize a party for me?” he asks.   
“ _Duh._ ”   
“I—that’d be really nice, I think? Thanks, Rich,” he says, and Richie will replay the way Eddie smiles shyly and hides his face in the pillow until the day he fucking dies. _Cute, cute, cute_.   
“Don’t mention it, shortstack.” He bites back a sweeter nickname, because after getting a boner just minutes ago, he really has no business throwing around words like _honey_ , or _babe_ , however jokingly. “And while we’re at it, why don’t you show me some other commands?”

Eddie hums. “I can’t be bothered to teach you the whole system.”  
“ _Rude_.”   
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Eddie says, faux innocent, “I meant to say: I can’t be _fucked_ to teach you the whole system. Is that better?”   
Richie snorts and swats his free hand at Eddie’s chest. “You’re so fucking mean. I regret ever teaching you any swear word.”   
“Hey, it’s nothing personal. It’s just too difficult to explain—every letter has its combination, and if you press a button at the wrong moment or with the wrong amount of pressure you’ll get a completely different word; different punctuation, even.”   
“Why so complicated?”   
“It wasn’t too complicated for Dr. Kaspbrak,” Eddie explains with a shrug. “But no one could figure it out after he and Sonia died, and that’s why I passed through so many hands. I guess the last buyer just gave up, and left me in their house on Neibolt Street when they moved.” Before Richie can chime in with a stupid joke to distract him from the grim topic, Eddie lights up all on his own. “I can teach you how to program in your name, though! That’s not too difficult.”

The next minutes are spent with Richie trying to memorize the right combination of buttons and levers to press, both him and Eddie sitting up on the bed so he can actually see what he’s doing. They keep distracting each other, and somehow they end up arguing which one of them is better at playing Tetris on the Game Boy—but eventually Richie learns the sequence, and he helps Eddie place the removable panel back on with a satisfied smile.

Richie even forgets that they’re not in the safety of the Clubhouse, but in his _bedroom,_ in the middle of a Sunday morning when he knows both his parents are home.   
He gets a reminder not long after. 

A voice filters up from the backyard through his window. “ _Richie?_ ” 

_Oh oh._ “That’s my _dad_ ,” he whispers to Eddie, and for a second they both stay frozen in place.   
Then, Eddie is scrambling back under the covers, and the way he spreads out his limbs to stay as flat as possible would make Richie laugh if he wasn’t so busy piling pillows and blankets over him in an artistically inconspicuous way. As if his dad can even see inside his room—they’re one story up, for God’s sake.   
“Yeah, dad?” Richie yells.   
“Why’s the ladder outside your window?”   
“I—uh. Used it to get up in my room yesterday.”   
“ _Why?_ ” 

What’s an in-character explanation that won’t raise suspicion? 

“Because I’m an idiot?”  
There’s a metallic rustling, and Richie figures his dad is lifting the ladder away from the side of the house and back to the garage, or the tree he was trimming yesterday. “At least you’re aware of it,” he deadpans.   
Eddie giggles at that, and Richie gives a smack to what he thinks is his head. “It could be worse!” he yells at his dad, “I could be doing heavy drugs behind your back or something. Consider yourself lucky, mister!”

Good ol’ Wentworth Tozier doesn’t dignify him with an answer, which is awesome because it means that the conversation is over and Richie won’t get busted with a strange boy in his bed.

The pile of pillows next to him shifts, and Eddie’s ruffled head appears from under the covers like a turtle coming out of its shell. “Is it safe? Should I hide under your bed just in case?”  
Richie grins at the terrified look on his face. “Don’t worry. If someone finds you here, I’ll just tell them you’re my ventriloquist doll,” he says. “That is, if you don’t mind having my hand up your—”

Eddie smacks a pillow right to his face before he can finish the sentence, almost throwing him off the bed. Richie just cackles at the furious curve of his eyebrows, and the way he spits out _that’s not funny, fuckface,_ until tears come out and his abs hurt. Eddie pretends to stay mad for as long as he can, but then his face splits in a wide smile of his own, and Richie thinks that if every morning was like this one, he wouldn’t have another bad one for the rest of his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did someone say t-t-t-title drop?! I had to include the line "Do automata dream of electric spaghetti?" at least once in context, to make it at least a little bit less stupid. 
> 
> (Also, is using a Toulouse-Lautrec painting as a base for a Reddie fanart morally and ethically wrong? Let me know in the comments below.)


	7. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bev clears her throat. “Should we tell Eddie all this?”  
> “No,” says Richie, resolute. “Not tonight, at least. Come on, guys, it’s his first Halloween. It’s supposed to be fun-spooky, not actually scary.”  
> “But eventually…” says Mike, and looks at him expectantly.  
> Richie huffs. “Fuck, alright, I’ll tell him myself. ‘Eddie, everyone who’s ever loved you or has been connected to you died a gruesome death, probably at the hands of a psychotic mime because everyone knows mimes are serial killers.’ How’s that for a summary?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's Halloween! In February! You can, and should, thank [rea_of_sunshine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rea_of_sunshine/pseuds/rea_of_sunshine/works) for the absolute chaos of this chapter.

_October 31st, 1993_

“Ouch! Bev, Jesus Christ, don’t just jam the brush in my eye!”

Bev sighs, and Richie may not see her eye roll but he feels it in his _bones_. “Boys. They can’t even deal with a bit of eyeshadow without whining.”  
Richie resists the temptation to scratch his face, where the unfamiliar sensation of makeup is making his skin itch. He follows Bev’s instructions and keeps his eyes closed, and she starts softly blowing over his eyelids to make the cream eyeshadow dry faster. “I don’t know how you do this almost everyday. It feels weird as fuck.”

He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor of Mike’s bedroom, with Bev perched on the bed in front of him so she’s at the right height to work on his Halloween makeup—which he can’t _wait_ to see Eddie react to, alongside the rest of the costume Richie picked. Eddie will insult him all night, it’s gonna be amazing. 

Mike and Bev are still in their normal clothes, because, in a long Loser tradition, they will not reveal each other’s costume until the last minute—Richie still remembers the year Ghostbusters came out and Bill and Richie, like the two dumbass eight year olds they were, ended up rolling on the grass outside of Bill’s house because they had both picked Venkman as their costume. They were ready to fight to the death to see who the superior one was, while Stan stood watching in his David Bowie costume without moving a finger to stop them.

Richie hears the squeak of Mike turning on his chair. “Can I get back to telling you what I found? Or should I let Bev insult the male gender some more?”  
“I can free my schedule from boy-bashing for a while,” responds Bev, and with a pat to Richie’s shoulder she gives him the okay to open his eyes again. “Go on, Mike.”  
“So kind of you. Anyway, I didn’t find anything in the Folklore section. I mean, there are a lot of legends and myths about gods that can give life, but nothing tied to Derry, you know? Nothing about mechanical objects gaining free will, either.”  
Richie stretches his back while Bev is busy looking for something in her bag. “Yeah, I’m not surprised,” he says, “I don’t think we’re dealing with mainstream mythology here. We can’t just assume it was Zeus who brought Eddie to life, or Loki. It’s gotta be something—”  
“Undocumented? Obscure? Out of our scope of knowledge?” finishes Mike. He’s sitting at his desk, long legs stretched in front of him, and he’s sipping sporadically at a cup of tea.  
“That’s a good way of putting it,” comments Bev. “Ah! Found it, my precious eyeliner. Come on, give me your face, Richie.”  
“Why, you wanna sit on it?”  
“I doubt that mouth of yours is good for anything but talking. Now stop being gross, and relax. What were you saying, Mike?”

Mike laughs at the exchange, shaking his head like an exasperated father. “That I didn’t find anything in the Folklore section, but I _did_ find something else.” Richie spies him out of the corner of his eye, his face kept in the place by Bev’s gentle hand, and sees him pick up a leather album from a shelf.  
“I decided to do some more research about the circus company Eddie told us about,” he explains.  
His voice drops into the conspiratorial tone that never fails to make Richie feel like a kid about to go on an adventure. He has no problem imagining Mike as an Indiana Jones type who travels the world in search of rare books and kicks ass while doing so.  
“He told us his creator and his wife suddenly disappeared one day, right? _And_ , that the same happened to their kid earlier—it seemed too much of a coincidence to me, so I dug deeper.”  
Bev finishes drawing a long line on Richie’s cheek and turns to look at Mike. “I guess you found something interesting?” 

Mike nods. “Oh, yeah. I had to look through a shitton of old newspapers, but it paid off: Edward Kaspbrak went missing here, in Derry, in March 1927. And guess what was happening in Derry at the same time?”  
Richie feels the trepidation build in his stomach. “Mike, you’re not filming a real crime documentary, just _tell us_.”  
“I was leading up to that!” he complains, but still stops to take a long sip of tea, because he might look like a kind-hearted farm boy but deep down he’s still a little shit. Richie wouldn’t have it any other way.  
“ _Mike_.”  
“The circus!” he exclaims, raising his arms for emphasis. “The same circus Dr. Kaspbrak would eventually work with, more than ten years later, was in Derry when his son disappeared. Now, we could chalk that up to a crazy twist of fate—if there weren’t other disappearances in Derry that happened _every_. Single. Time the circus was in town.”

Bev turns to share an incredulous look with Richie, her eyebrows raised high on her forehead. “Maybe—maybe some people ran away _with_ the circus? Like, literally?”  
“Yeah, could be. Too bad that many others turned up dead months later. And I’m talking _dead_ dead. The police kept coming across _half-eaten_ bodies in the river, or the sewers.”  
“Fucking hell,” mutters Richie, “I knew this town sucked, but this brings it to a whole other level.”  
“When did the killings stop?” asks Beverly.  
“Let me guess,” Richie says before Mike can answer. “When the circus stopped coming to town?”  
“Exactly.”

There’s a moment of silence where two of them digest the information, and the third calmly finishes his tea like he didn’t just drop a horror movie plot in their laps. Richie guesses that after a while of researching this shit you get desensitized to it.  
Bev clears her throat. “Should we tell Eddie all this?”  
“No,” says Richie, resolute. “Not tonight, at least. Come on, guys, it’s his _first Halloween_. It’s supposed to be fun-spooky, not actually scary.”  
“But eventually…” says Mike, and looks at him expectantly.  
Richie huffs. “Fuck, alright, I’ll tell him myself. ‘Eddie, everyone who’s ever loved you or has been connected to you died a gruesome death, probably at the hands of a psychotic mime because everyone knows mimes are serial killers.’ How’s that for a summary?”

“I think,” Bev says, “that I could sew your mouth shut for tonight. It would add to the costume you picked as well. Thoughts?”  
“Oh, you know I can’t say no to you,” coos Richie, battling his eyelashes with a love-sick smile on his face. “I’m yours, now and forever—fuck me up, darling.”  
Both Bev and Mike laugh at that. Maybe it’s the Voice Richie puts on, a pretty good impression of Rhett Butler in _Gone with the Wind_ if he does say so himself; or maybe they’re just glad for the distraction from the dark topic. Either way, Bev goes back to painting careful lines over Richie’s face, and they talk and laugh and distract Mike from the math homework he’s still trying to finish. 

_It’s gonna be a good night,_ Richie thinks, or promises himself. And then, like he always does lately: _I can’t wait to see Eddie._

⛦⛦⛦ 

Richie finishes carefully slicking back his hair, the rest of his costume already in place. It took an entire bottle of gel and his mom’s stronger-than-aerated-concrete hairspray, but he’s effectively curl-less for the night. His hands are sticky, he made a mess on his bed sheets, he sort of wants to cry and go to sleep—sounds like a typical Friday night. 

Richie _was_ getting ready in the bathroom, where things were going more smoothly, but he got kicked out for taking too long, so he finished in his bedroom with a handheld mirror he stole from his mom.  
Thank God Bev has already done most of the job. Richie examines himself one last time in the small mirror: the foundation, a very pale pink, makes his skin look smooth and ghostly; the dark red shadow over his lids and the straight black lines cutting through his face add to the illusion. Richie even put on contacts for the sake of the look, although he knows they’ll give him a headache if he wears them for too long.

No matter, he can’t think about that right now. Bill will come pick him up in less than ten minutes, probably with Stan already in the car.  
Richie grabs the red bowtie from his bedside table, and wraps it around his neck as neatly as he manages—he found it in a box of old clothes in the garage, and if his memory isn’t failing him, it comes from that year, before he really had any friends, that his dad dressed up for Halloween to go trick or treat with him. He only wore a stupid clown wig and the red bowtie over his normal clothes, but it meant the world to six-year-old Richie. 

It’s sort of poetic, really, that now Richie himself is wearing it for Halloween with the clear intention of getting Eddie pissed off at him. 

He will scrunch up his nose and say, _not funny, Richie,_ in that prissy tone of his, and maybe even pick Richie up like he did that time at the Clubhouse to get revenge on him.  
Richie stops tying his shoes, and he lets out a sigh so lovesick it’s honestly embarrassing, even if no one else is in the room to see the dopey smile on his face.  
He might love the fact that Eddie is smaller than him, all dainty and cute, and that he could fit nicely in his lap if he wanted to—but he would lie if he said he does _not_ also love that he’s so, so much stronger than Richie. He still remembers how easily Eddie lifted him up, like Richie isn’t a full head taller than him, and kept him there until Richie relented and apologized for...what was it? Saying he had no core strength? Ah, the irony! 

Richie came home that night and made a beeline for the shower to jerk off, because he had been half hard the entire time after Eddie pulled that stunt. He thought about his legs wrapped around Eddie’s hips, and Eddie pinning him against a wall to suck bruise after bruise on Richie’s neck, and he came so hard his knees buckled and he almost slipped on the water-slick floor of the shower.  
It certainly was a good way to relieve the stress of everything that had happened at the Arcade the same afternoon—Bowers humiliating him in front of everyone, Connor trying to kiss him, the pain of his split lip. 

Richie shakes the thoughts away. He can’t get hard right now, for God’s sake, not when he’s about to meet his friends, and more importantly not when he’s wearing _suspenders_ and _striped socks_. He will not sink that low.  
It seems like that’s only thing Richie’s doing lately, trying not to get hard, what with sleeping in the same bed as Eddie and waking up to his tousled hair and doe eyes right there, next to Richie’s pillow.  
He’s eternally grateful that his parents never invade the privacy of his room (his mom swore to never enter it again, lest the eternal messy state of it gave her a stress-induced heart attack once and for all), because otherwise this sleeping arrangement could never work. Sneaking Eddie out of the house every morning is still really risky, but at least they can stay in the same bed without worrying someone is going to see them.

Richie loves it. It’s torture, because of course it is, but he loves it. One morning a week ago, despite having fallen asleep at a respectful distance, Richie woke up spooning him—Eddie’s ass was flush to Richie’s hips, and he felt firm but warm in his arms, and Richie thought he would die there and then. 

He didn’t die.  
He almost _does_ bite the dust when he hears the honk of Bill’s car through his bedroom window, and accidentally misses the last step of the stairs in his haste to get out of the house—he thinks that, at least, it would have been a marginally more honorable way to go than Death By Spooning. 

Thankfully no one hears the shriek that leaves his lips—his parents are out on a romantic, middle-aged date or whatever, so Richie has the whole place to himself. For once Eddie won’t have to sneak in from the window when they get back tonight.

He grabs the jacket he picked for his costume—an old thing that he found in a thrift shop; warm but too tight around the waist so that he can wear it only open—and slips out of the house. He spots Bill’s car immediately.  
“Are you guys fucking ready?” Richie says as soon as he’s sitting down in the backseat. Or at least he tries to, but the words die in his throat when he sees what Stan and Bill are dressed as. “ _Oh my God_ ,” he whispers, already grinning from ear to ear. “You’re _matching_?”

Stan turns to look at him, and his eyes are half-hidden behind a mask, but Richie _knows_ he’s rolling them. “We didn’t mean to.”  
“You fucking better not have! We’re not supposed to know what the others’ costumes are!”  
“Bev knew yours!” Stan protests.  
“Yeah, but only because she helped me with the makeup!”  
“I s-swear, it was an ac-accident” Bill says, and his mouth is the only uncovered part of his face, because he’s dressed as Batman and Stan is dressed as _Robin,_ like, he’s in green shorts and a cape, and Richie is losing his damn _mind_ over this.  
“Bill, you look amazing,” he says, laughing and patting his friend on the back. Bill always puts an incredible amount of effort in his costume, and this year is no exception: the Batman mask isn’t the cheap version you can buy at the toy store, and from what Richie can see, the black cape is heavy and hand-sewn. “But Stan, Staniel, _Stan the Man_ —you look hot as hell, baby. Holy _smokes_.”

Stan is trying his hardest to look dignified, but he just _can’t,_ not when he’s dressed in one of the goofiest superhero costumes ever designed. “I knew this would be a bad idea.”  
“Just, those shorts, the green and red combo, _wow_ —”  
“I’ll show you a black and blue combo if you don’t drop it—”  
“I’m willing to stop fucking your mom indefinitely just to have one night with you—”  
“ _Guys._ ” 

Stan and Richie turn to look at Bill.  
Bill clears his throat, grips the wheel tighter. “I can’t drive with yo-you two screaming l-like this. Shut up for five mi-minutes?” 

They do. Richie keeps trying to untie Stan’s mask the entire time, but he does do it silently—if he were Bill, he’d count it as a win. 

The ride downtown is a short one, and it almost takes them longer to find a parking spot when they get there without running over some excited child on a sugar high. The plan is to meet the others under the Paul Bunyan statue and dick around the Halloween fair for a while before getting drunk on the beer Mike promised to bring with him.  
The three of them walk side by side, following the flow of children and bored parents that pours from the center of town, where all the excitement is. Derry is a shitty town for most of the year, but even Richie can admit it’s not so unbearable during the festivities, especially Halloween. For him, not even Christmas can beat free candy, playing dress up, and seeing all the streets lit up by Jack-o-Lanterns on every porch.

When they get to the statue, Ben and Mike are already waiting for them.  
Oh _. Oh, wow._  
Richie feels his soul ascend to Heaven. Not only Mike is _also_ dressed as Robin, which Richie will make jokes about for the rest of his natural life, but Ben’s costume is

“A bundle of grapes?” he shrieks, making a small kid who was passing by look at him in panic “Ben, why are you—is it made of _balloons_?”  
Ben’s jovial smile falls. “Why, does it look bad?”  
“What? No, dude, it looks amazing,” laughs Richie, and he means it—the purple balloons are arranged on his body in a triangular shape, kept together by who-knows-what, and it’s so silly but also so _Ben_ that Richie can’t help but love it. “How did you sit in the car like that?”  
“I didn’t. My mom, uh—helped me put it together when we got here. I had to come early to be ready in time.”  
“ _Oh my God.”_ _  
_ “What?”  
“Nothing, you’re so pure. I don’t know why you’re friends with me—oh, by the way, I should mention that I do have a needle on my person at the moment.”  
Stan, who was comparing costumes with Mike, turns to glare at him. “Don’t ruin Ben’s costume.” _  
_ _“_ I don’t have any spare balloon, Richie,” Ben whispers, panic in his eyes, like Richie has him at gunpoint and he’s begging him to, if he really has to kill him, at least spare his kids and wife. 

Let it be noted that 1) Richie is not a monster, but most importantly that 2) he actually does _not_ have a needle.  
It doesn’t mean that he can’t torture his friend a bit. “Well, you better not piss me off, then, right?” he says, dropping his tone to sound more threatening.  
The look of pure terror on Ben’s face almost makes him feel bad. Almost.

Richie turns to Bill, who’s standing next to him, looking really distracted by...Mike and Stan? “Oh, right!” Richie exclaims, “you’ve got two Robins to pick from, now. How the hell did this happen, by the way? I didn’t even know you guys were such big Robin fans.”  
“I think he’s pretty cool, and I liked the color scheme,” Mike comments with a shrug. Unlike Stan who lives by the words Go Big Or Go Home more than anyone else Richie knows, Mike didn’t show up with mini-shorts and nothing else, but he put on a pair of black leggings underneath like a normal person would. “Bill? You okay, man?”

Bill startles. “What? Yeah, I-I-I— _fine_. I’m fine.”  
He doesn’t look fine. He looks like he’s blushing furiously under the Batman mask, and like making eye-contact with Mike is an impossible feat at the moment. What the fuck is going on?

Richie opens his mouth to ask, but he’s distracted by Stan pointing a finger behind his shoulder. “Looks like at least we’re paired up,” he says.  
Richie turns around. He immediately spots Bev in the crowd, covered head to toe in fake blood, so much that the color of her hair is indistinguishable from the rest—there’s a plastic crown sparkling on her head, and Richie thinks _Carrie, that’s genius,_ but then he notices whose hand she’s grasping and suddenly he understands both Stan’s comment and what it feels to be completely head over heels for someone.

Eddie is also in a Batman costume. 

In hindsight, it makes sense, considering how fast he’s devouring the old DC comics that Bill and Richie keep giving him to read. Not that Richie’s thinking about that right now, too busy trying to wipe the stupid, dopey smile from his face that the sight of Eddie in a Batman mask and a skin-tight Spandex costume put there.  
Bev must have sewn it for him. Richie already knew she was helping Eddie put something together for today, but he had no idea Eddie was going to show up like _this_ , with a light grey suit snug around his thighs and slim hips—and his _ass_. Thank God he’s wearing a cape down to his knees, because if Richie was exposed all night to the sight of his ass in tight clothing, he’d need to excuse himself to scream somewhere in private (and also maybe, probably jerk off). 

Eddie looks somewhat panicked, and he’s holding onto Bev’s hand like it’s a lifeline.  
Richie itches to run towards him and take him under his arm, hold him against his side to show him that he’s safe, that even if they’re surrounded by strangers, he still has Richie to lean on.  
From the corner of his eye, he sees Mike wave to catch their attention, and soon they’re all joining in. Bev perks up when she sees them and tugs Eddie along with an excited smile on her face. The fake blood makes it look sharp and startlingly white even from a distance. 

“Hi, guys!” she says when she reaches the group and puts both her hands on Eddie’s shoulders as if to show him off. “Look who finally came out of his Batcave.”  
Eddie gives them an awkward wave. “Hi. This is...overwhelming. Bill, I didn’t know—I didn’t want to steal your idea or anything—”  
“N-no, man, don’t w-worry about it,” Bill reassures him with a warm smile. “Like S-Stan was say-saying, at least w-we’re paired up, n-now.”  
Now that they’re standing close, Richie catalogs the differences in their attire. Bill’s look more expensive, and the cape is in a heavy fabric that falls nicely down his shoulders—but the suit doesn’t fit him like a glove the way Eddie’s does, a second skin over his lean and compact form. The rest of the costume is a patchwork of things Bev, the only one of them who knew what he wanted to dress as, must have helped him either make or find: tiny black shorts; a large yellow belt Richie has seen her wear a couple of times before; a cheap Batman mask that doesn’t cover much of his face, just enough to hide the thin sutures in his skin where the pieces meet. 

Richie thinks he looks adorable, and he wouldn’t trade the sight of Eddie shuffling awkwardly in his borrowed black boots for all the expensive superhero capes in the world.

“I guess you’re right,” Eddie is saying, smiling tentatively back at Bill. Then his eyes fall on Richie, and his face goes all serious. “Richie.”  
“Yeah, Spagheds?” Richie says, grinning like a maniac.  
“What. The fuck. Are you dressed as.”  
“What, you can’t guess?” he asks, feigning innocence. He strikes a plastic pose, arms raised and bent at the elbow like a puppet held up by strings. He keeps his face slack and eyes unfocused, and lets Bev’s makeup do the rest: the lines on the side of his mouth make it look like a detachable piece, and so does the one around his neck, shaded to give the illusion of two separated parts held together.  
“A doll,” says Eddie, unimpressed. Bev, still standing beside him, stifles a giggle. “You could have picked anything in the world, and you went with a _doll_.”

He sounds _glacial_. Richie laughs and shuffles closer to Eddie on rigid legs, moving like he has as many joints in his body as a wooden puppet. He can’t resist pinching Eddie’s cheeks when he’s close enough, and he only has a moment to enjoy the give and warmth of his skin, so much more human-like that the day he found him in Neibolt, before Eddie is slapping away his hand.  
“I can’t believe you!” he says. Richie can read him well enough to know he’s not really upset.  
“It’s an _homage_ , Eds!”  
“It’s a _dick move!_ ”

They bicker for a while, their usual back and forth that goes nowhere, but at least it serves to make Eddie forget the unfamiliar crowd of people around them.  
Then Stan and Mike force them apart, repeating, _wooo boys, calm down,_ the entire time like they’re trying to sedate a bar fight or something. Richie laughs and slings his arm around Stan’s shoulder. “Hey, wanna see my impression of a ragdoll?” he says, and before Stan can answer Richie goes limp against him, almost dragging both of them to the ground.  
“What is wrong with—Richie, this cape is a rental!”  
“You _rented_ this?”  
“That’s not the point. Inferior Robin, can you give me a hand holding him up? He’s pretending he can’t use his legs.”

Mike is still smiling when the words register, and it quickly fades off his face. “Hey! Why am I the Inferior Robin?” he asks but still loops an arm around Richie’s chest and drags him fully back to his feet.  
“Uh, _strong_ ,” Richie coos, putting on a voice that vaguely resembles Princess Daphne from _Dragon’s Lair_ , a game Richie has played so much at the Arcade that he’s sure it’s the main cause of his brain cells loss. “Stan, how dare you, _you’_ re the inferior one. You don’t have biceps like _that_.”

It’s only after a whole bunch of mock-fighting that they finally get on with the program for the night: eat too much candy, get drunk, and somewhere between the two, show Eddie the joys of trick or treating.

 _You’re too old for trick or treating_ , some people might say, and there’s an old lady on the second street they visit that does exactly that when she opens her door expecting to see kids and finds a bunch of high school seniors instead.  
Eddie has been smiling brightly the entire time, looking delighted when he received his very first candy, even if he can’t eat it. Richie doesn’t have the heart to tell him they’re not exactly the right demographic, and he really doesn’t want this random woman to ruin it for him—but he still doesn’t expect Stan to be just as fiercely protective.   
The old lady had just enough time to get her words out before Stan is stepping forward, somehow looking menacing even in his ridiculous outfit, and saying, “I don’t think you heard us right. _Trick,_ or treat.”

He makes it sound like the trick in question is a baseball bat to all of her house’s windows, and then Bev smiles wide—which looks terrifying, with all the fake blood dripping from her hair down her face, and that’s all it takes for the woman to grab a bunch of candies from the plastic pumpkin she’s holding and stuff them in Eddie’s open bag. 

When Eddie looks satisfied with the bounty they have acquired, Richie jogs up to Mike and asks him if he could kindly go retrieve that alcohol he’s promised from his car, so they can do some good ol’ underage drinking now that it’s late enough for the younger kids to be heading home.  
Mike gives him a solemn nod and grabs Bill’s and Stan’s arms to drag them along. They walk away together, with the comical effect of Batman being the shortest of the group, in the middle of the two Robins like they’re his personal bodyguards.

Richie walks back to where the rest of the group is chatting and eating half of their stash of chocolate. “Who’s ready to get shitfaced?” he says, sneaking a hand under Eddie’s cape so he can hook a finger in the waistband of his shorts and let it snap back on his side. Eddie swats at his hand and offers him his bag of candy.  
Ben shuffles further from Richie. “I don’t think we can get shitfaced on beer.”  
“I’m gonna give it a valiant effort,” Richie rebuts. “Say, Haystack, why do you keep running away from me?”  
“No reason.”  
“You scared I’m gonna pop, pop, _pop!_ those balloons?”  
Bev throws a candy wrapper at his face. “Stop threatening him! He accidentally popped one already.”  
“Yeah,” Ben sighs, looking dejectedly at the empty space on his side.  
Richie stuffs his face with the rest of the M&M’s he picked and makes his way closer to Ben. “Ooh, poor Ben, I’m so sorry. Come on, let me give you a hug.”  
“Don’t you dare!”  
“What?” he laughs. Ben still thinks he has a needle somewhere on his body, and the fact that Richie very much doesn’t makes Ben’s fussing that much funnier. “I want to comfort my friend who just had a terrible loss.”  
Ben waggles a finger at him and recedes more until he’s backed himself between a wall and a hedge. Richie presses his thumb and forefinger together to convince Ben that he actually has something small and pointy in his hand, and Ben, in an attempt to dodge an attack that’s not coming, moves to the right and hits the row of bushes. The purple balloons taped to his body pop one right after the other from the contact with the branches and sharp leaves.

The sound actually scares the shit out of Richie, who despite his charade wasn’t expecting anything to explode. He jumps back, hand pressed to his chest, and then starts cackling when he sees the state of Ben’s costume. There are only two balloons left intact.  
“Dude, oh my god,” he manages to say, “I didn’t even _have_ a fucking needle!”  
“I’m sorry, Ben,” Eddie says, nodding gravely in his cheap Batman mask. _So cute_. “Shit sucks, doesn’t it?”

The serious way in which he says it sends Richie back in a laughing fit, even as Bev smacks his arm on her way to comfort poor Ben. 

They all sit down on the curb as they wait for the others to come back, the street they’re on quiet and out of the way of the flood of parents dragging their children back home before the hour gets too late.  
Richie already feels kind of drunk without touching a drop of alcohol, high on spending quality time with his friends, and they way Eddie smiles wide now that they’re not surrounded by an overwhelming number of strangers. Eddie fishes a Mars bar out of his bag of candies, and somehow, they end up loudly singing _Life on Mars?,_ all of them off key—which is how Mike, Bill, and Stan find them when they come back, just as Bev finishes freeing Ben of the last deflated balloon. 

Mike tosses each of them a can of beer, even Eddie, who, and Richie quotes, ‘would like to participate in the drinking ritual even if he can’t actually drink.’  
(Richie ends up downing Eddie’s beer as well, plus half of Ben’s, which are one and a half beers too many, considering how far down his mood will drop in the next hour or so. He tends to get weepy when drunk. Not like Stan, who’s a ridiculous lightweight and goes all flirty and touchy-feely after a single drink.)

Eddie seems to be having the time of life watching all of them get progressively more fucked up as the night progresses. They slowly make their way back to where all the stands and game booths are crowded around the Paul Bunyan statue, which is covered in fake cobwebs for the occasion. Richie finds the stickiest candy he can and pops three of them in his mouth, which he opens to show the mess of half-chewed caramel to Stan whenever he expects it the least, and it never fails to make Stan grimace in disgust.

It must already be pretty late when Bev whips out an old Polaroid camera from her backpack, which a now-costume-less Ben has been carrying around for her.  
“Come on, guys, let’s immortalize the moment. The Batmans first, please!” she says, pushing Bill and Eddie close together.  
Bill strikes a pose with his hands on his hips, and Richie hollers when Eddie, grinning wide and flushed red, does the same. Bev snaps the photo, and when the image is done developing she hands it to Eddie, who takes it reverently in his gloved hands like it’s a precious gift. 

Next is Mike and Stan, whose photo comes out as a still of them mid pretend-fight, like they’re battling over who actually gets to be the Superior Robin. Richie poses for a bunch of them as well, but he’s unsteady on his feet and sort of dazed already, so he couldn’t tell you which of the Losers he does it with, or if he took any of the photos himself.  
There’s a specific one, though, which he couldn’t forget if he doused his brain in all the vodka in the world. He’s stumbling closer to Eddie, following Mike’s instructions to squeeze closer to fit in the frame, and he almost falls on his ass. Eddie sighs, unimpressed, and before Richie can decipher what the fuck is going on, he’s being picked up and slung over Eddie’s shoulder like it’s nothing.  
“Holy shit!” Mike laughs, getting ready to take the photo, “I didn’t know you could do that!”  
Eddie shifts Richie’s weight in a more comfortable position and curls his hand around his forearm. “Of course, I can,” he says in a fake deep voice, “I’m Batman”—and Richie is a weak creature, so he falls in love with him a bit more, if possible. 

He raises his head to look back at the camera, and while Mike is shaking the picture in his hand in an effort to make it develop faster, Eddie manhandles Richie some more until he’s back on his feet.  
“Okay, th-this one’s the best o-one,” Bill comments, with his chin hooked over Mike’s shoulder to see the end result.  
“I’m not surprised: I’m in it,” Richie jokes, but he’s still flustered beyond reason, and he’s struggling to take his eyes off Eddie’s smiling profile. Eddie turns to him, tilts his head in curiosity—the twinkling lights all around them reflect in his eyes, so dark otherwise behind the edges of the mask, and Richie can feel the ghost of his fingers wrapped around him, and he wants to lean in and kiss and lick the grin off his pretty face. 

But he can’t, and it breaks his stupid, drunk heart. 

The feeling doesn’t leave him—if anything it gets more and more difficult to keep his hands to himself, to resist the need to sneak his hands under Eddie’s cape and tug him into a side-hug, pepper kisses on his soft hair.  
Thankfully, Stan reached the right level of drunkness to not only tolerate, but to respond in kind when Richie drapes himself over him instead, trying to find an outlet for this need for contact. 

Richie almost recovered from the annoying mood he fell in, when Mike frowns and asks, “Where the hell are Bev and Ben?”  
He’s barely finished the sentence when Bev pops her head from behind the fish-a-duck booth, crown crooked on her head and hair a mess, and then steps out hand in hand with a wide-eyed Ben. He’s smiling like a fool.  
“Uh, _finally_ ,” Stan groans, eyes dramatically rolled skyward.  
Eddie frowns. “Finally what?”  
“They finally kissed,” Richie stage-whispers in his ear and proceeds to blow in it until Eddie giggles and pushes him away—but his hand lingers on Richie’s shoulder longer than necessary, and that’s what he decides to focus on. 

Bev drags Ben back to the group, and he follows her with a love-sick smile on his face and Bev’s own fake blood smeared all over his mouth.  
Mike whistles and pats his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “I see Bev helped you create an impromptu vampire costume, uh?” he says, and they all laugh when Ben covers his face, obviously embarrassed at the whole thing. Bev pries his fingers open and raises on her tiptoes to smack a loud kiss on the corner of his lips—Richie has to look away before he does something dumb like breaking into tears or some shit. 

He’s happy for them, he really is. He can’t imagine a more respectful, kind, loving guy for Bev than Ben; and Ben has been desperately in love with her for years. They should be with each other. They deserve to be with each other. 

Still, when they propose to go win some stuffed animals at one of the many game booths around, and the opportunity to lick his wounds in peace presents itself, Richie silently slinks away.  
He finds a nice little corner not far away and sits down with only his paper-bag-wrapped beer to keep him company. 

He considers screaming his frustration to the clear night sky, but he would probably still feel like shit and _also_ have a sore throat. He resolves to just think about how he’s still going to wake up with Eddie in his bed the next morning and to quietly steam in his own stupid, painful crush. He hopes Eddie will roll over in his sleep and drape himself over Richie like he sometimes does. 

_Fuck_. _He_ wants to drag him somewhere and kiss him silly and then come back to his friends and have them all tease Eddie on how he’s got Richie’s makeup all over his face. It’s fucking stupid that he can’t. 

He’s not left alone with his beer-induced pining for long. Soon enough, he hears the crunching of gravel under a pair of feet, but when he raises his eyes, it’s the wrong Batman logo that greets him.

Bill sinks down on the edge of the sidewalk to sit next to him and takes off the dumb cowboy hat that replaced his mask somewhere between now and when Richie left. “Y-You okay, Rich?”  
“Mh?” Richie asks, still lost in his thoughts. “Oh, yeah, ‘m fine.”  
“You don’t l-look that fine to m-me,” Bill says, knocking his shoulder on Richie’s. “What’s got y-you down?”  
Richie flusters under the attention, for once wishing he could just be ignored and left to brood in peace. “I don’t know, Bill,” he deflects, “The state of the economy? The problems in the bedroom I’m having with your mom? It’s been a tough month; the spark between us is totally gone, for some reason—”  
“ _Richie._ ”  
He sighs, dropping his shoulders. The voices of children and the music of the fair are muffled, but Richie still feels too exposed, like someone is eavesdropping on their conversation. “What do you want me to say? I think I just drank too much, maybe I need to go home.”  
Bill hums, takes a sip from the melting milkshake he’s holding in his gloved hand. “Is t-this about B-Bev and Ben?”  
“Why would it be about them?” Richie frowns. “I’m happy for them.”  
“T-T-that’s not what I meant,” Bill says. He takes a deep breath, like he’s bracing himself for something. “I k-know that I’ve been—dis-distracted, lately, even s-spaced out.”  
Richie is about to protest, because like hell he’s going to let Bill apologize for not getting over his brother’s death quick enough, but Bill raises a hand to stop him. “No, l-let me finish. I’ve n-not been en-entirely myself, but I still k-know you, Richie, and I can put t-the pieces together. Stop me if I’m w-wrong about so-something?”  
Richie arches an eyebrow, confused but curious. “I, uh—okay, go ahead.”  
“ _So_ ,” Bill starts, “B-Bev and Ben have been d-d-ancing around, well.. _.that_ ,”—he makes a vague gesture at his face, referring to the kiss, or maybe the way Ben’s face got covered in fake blood because of it—“for a while—sp-spending time together w-without the rest of us, sneaking gl-glances when they think the other isn’t watching. That sort of thing. R-emind you of anyone?”  
Richie pales at the insinuation, and he briefly ponders if he can get away with fleeing the scene and pretending this conversation never happened in the first place. He swallows the last of his beer. “Bill—”  
“Richie, it’s o-okay, I swear. It’s _f-fine_ ,” Bill says, voice lower, and he squeezes Richie’s knee. Richie relaxes marginally—he’s always been a tactile person, and Bill knows very well that the best way to calm him down is a grounding touch. “Can I keep g-going?”  
“Sure, Bill. Amaze me with your storytelling.”  
“Oh, shut up,” he says, but still smiles warmly at him.  
Richie wonders if he knows that when he tells a story he stops stuttering for a while—he’s too scared to point it out in case it ruins the magic.  
“ _As I was s-saying_ , we all know that Ben has been c-crushing on her for a while, so seeing him get everything he’s ever wanted? S-Seeing them come back hand in hand, looking at each other like no one else exists? I get it, Richie: you’re happy for them, but it still hurts.”  
Richie huffs a laugh, embarrassed that he’s apparently transparent enough for Bill to read him so well at a mere glance—which in turn makes him worry that he’s just as obvious to Eddie. 

Fuck, he’s way too drunk to deal with all this emotional shit. How do people do this on a regular basis?

“You wanna know just how much I get it?” Bill is saying. He nods to his right, where in the distance Richie can see the rest of the Losers play at a shooting booth. Bev is holding an oversized teddy bear. “I saw them come back together—Bev smiling as bright as the sun, Ben blushing to the tips of his hair—and the _only_ thing I could think was, _God, I want that with Mike_.”

For a few long seconds Richie thinks he didn’t hear him right. “Wait, what—you’re—” he stutters, still struggling to believe it. In the end, he settles on a heartfelt, if shocked, “ _Mike?_ ”  
Bill blushes and noisily sucks a sip of milkshake through his straw. “Yeah, Mike.”

 _Holy fucking shit. Big Bill is_ gay _? Big Bill is gay_ and _has a crush on Mike?_ _  
_ He looks back to their interactions in the past few months. Things start to make a lot more sense.

He clears his throat. “And does he…?”  
“I think so.”  
Richie groans, or maybe it’s a laugh, and sinks his head between his knees. He’s drunk and still a bit lovesick, and he just found out two of his very male best friends are...in love? Is that what’s happening here? “Jesus fucking Christ. I can’t believe this—you’ve never told me.”  
“Neither did you.”  
“Ah, like I was ever fooling anyone,” Richie snickers, raising his head to breathe in the cold air of the night in an attempt to stifle his headache. “Once the rumor got out when we were, like, fourteen, it was over. The best I could do was damage control, try not to confirm anything. But you—Bill, I never even suspected it, man, _what the fuck_.”  
Bill looks down at his milkshake and frowns. “Rich, I’m sorry—”  
“Don’t you fucking dare apologize,” Richie interrupts him. “You just wanted to be safe, do you think I could ever fault you for that? Staying hidden, it’s not...we live in _Derry_ , dude.” He wraps an arm around Bill’s shoulder and tugs him into a side-hug. “Fuck this town, you don’t owe it _shit._ ”  
Bill finally smiles, and melts more in the touch. “F-Fuck this town,” he agrees. 

Richie laughs and pops the discarded cowboy hat back on Bill’s head, to officially put an end to the heart-to-heart. “So...Mike, uh?” he says and waggles his eyebrows. “What was it that did it, the farm boy charm or his biceps?”  
“Shut up, T-Trashmouth…b-both.”  
“You horndog! It really is always the quiet ones,” sighs Richie, earning a pinch to side from Bill that makes him yelp, and then laugh again. They mock fight for a while, the way they used to do when they were kids, but Bill yields when Richie threatens his precious cape of physical harm.   
When their giggles die down, he turns to look at his friend—and it might be just the alcohol making him more emotional than usual, but Richie loves him so much he’s sure, without a shadow of doubt, that he would die for him. “I hope you’ll get your gay happy ending, Bill,” he says.  
“I h-hope you will, t-too,” Bill says and offers him the last of his chocolate milkshake with a smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to apologize for how unnecessarily horny this entire chapter was.  
> Please let me know what you thought!


	8. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Richie?” he says.  
> A sleep-heavy blink. “Mh?”  
> “I don’t know if this is normal,” Eddie whispers and presses a hand to where his stomach would be, where it hurts for some reason. “I don’t know if it’s real.”

Bev fires her last shot, and everyone cheers when she hits the tenth can in a row. Ben leans down to drop a kiss to her hair, and Eddie smiles, a bit ruefully, when she turns her head and tugs him down for one on the lips.  
Mike hollers, and because Bev is otherwise preoccupied, he’s the one that accepts the giant bear plush she just won from the unimpressed owner of the game booth. 

“Nice aim,” the man grumbles and looks with a sigh at the empty spot on the wall where the biggest prize once was. 

The air is crisp, and filled with overlapping music from all the attractions trying to lure in clients. Eddie has been marveling at the colors and the lights and the children in costume all night—that is, after he managed to stifle the panic of being surrounded by rowdy strangers for the first time in forever.  
Being covered head to toe by the suit Bev has sewn for him helped, and so did Richie’s easy-going attitude once all the Losers got together. In no time, Eddie was having fun, and the flashbacks to his years in the circus stopped being anxiety-inducing, and instead brought to mind a lot of good memories. 

Speaking of Richie, though. 

Eddie is trying to fall into easy chatter with Stan and Mike, but he keeps getting distracted by the sight of Richie off in the distance. He can’t see him clearly in the dark, but the obnoxious red of his pants sticks out from the muted tones of the sidewalk he’s sitting on. Bill is next to him—maskless, because he gave it to Mike when the other won a cowboy hat at one of the game booths and gifted it to Bill with a smile. 

He considers going over, but he’s not sure if he would be welcome. Are they having a private conversation they wouldn’t want Eddie to hear? And why did Richie, who thrives on having all of his friend’s attention on him, who can’t stand it when Eddie pointedly ignores him in favour of a book or the Tamagotchi he’s still learning how to use, felt the need to quietly leave to sit by himself?

As he’s thinking over what to do, Stan startles him by wrapping an arm around his shoulder. “We need to talk,” he says, and he somehow manages to resemble a successful but stressed business man even with bright green shorts on. 

Eddie lets himself be tugged away from the rest of the group, and even ends up holding part of Stan’s weight on his side when he starts dragging his feet—he must be at least a bit drunk. It’s strange seeing the effects that a couple of beers have on everyone around him, when Eddie has no idea what even being _tipsy_ feels like. 

Stan finds an empty space behind the stand that sells tickets to the Haunted House, and there he stops. “So, Eddie—Edward.”  
“Yes?” he asks politely.  
“I wanted to apologize,” Stan says. He clasps his hands over Eddie’s shoulders, and for some reason gives him a light shake. “I’m...very bad at apologizing. So gimme a minute, okay? Okay.”  
Eddie, despite his efforts to match Stan’s quiet intensity, can’t hold back an amused smile. Eddie doesn’t know what he needs to apologize for, but if this is what a drunk Stan acts like then he’s more than willing to listen. _This should be fun_ , he thinks.  
“Yes, of course, take your time.”

Stan nods, and fixes his cape straighter over his shoulders. “I think—I think I’m ready. So, you remember how I freaked out when I first met you? And I started hyperventilating and told you you were the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life?”  
“You never told me that.”  
“Oh. I must have only thought it, then.”  
“You really _are_ awful at this.”  
“Don’t distract me,” Stan says, and presses a finger to Eddie’s closed mouth. “Just— _sshh_ , okay? Can you _sshh_ for me?” Eddie glares at him from behind his Batman mask, but still gives Stan a thumbs up. “Fantastic. Like I was saying, I've been, as Richie put, an ‘absolute dickhead’ to you. If I made you feel like a freak, or like you didn’t belong with us...I’m sorry. I really am.”

Eddie softens at the apology. He didn’t blame Stan for his initial reaction to seeing him walk and talk, especially knowing that he had spent week after week prior to that trying to put Eddie back together. 

He takes Stan’s fingers away from his lips. “You don’t need to apologize, Stan. You’ve been nothing but nice to me since, and honestly? I had already forgotten about that. It’s all good, really.”  
“Good,” Stan echoes, nodding again, a tad too enthusiastically, “very good. No, see, I still feel bad about it.”  
“Really, I don’t resent you or anything, I—”  
“You know what! You know what.” Stan stumbles closer to him, and before Eddie knows it he has Stan's arm wrapped around his shoulder and his mouth on his ear. “I’ll tell you a _secret,”_ he whispers there, “so you’ll have blackmail material if I ever act like an asshole to you again.”  
“Okay? I guess?”  
Stan stays draped over him, and clears his throat. “Cool. Here it is: I don’t even like Robin.”  
“That’s a shitty secret, Stan.”  
“Let me finish! I don’t even like Robin, but I love _robins_. They’re my favourite birds, so cute and colorful, and their eggs are bright blue, isn’t that _so lovely?_ Don’t you ever wish you were a cute little robin so you could lay blue eggs, Eddie?”  
“ _What?_ Wait, nevermind, go on—this is getting good.”

Stan sighs, looking off into the distance like he’s still thinking about how amazing life would be if he was covered in feathers and could migrate to central Mexico every winter. “This was the closest I could dress to a robin for Halloween _. Now_ , you may be thinking, _why is this such a saucy secret?_ I’ll tell you why, you dumb slut.”  
Eddie sputters. “Stan, what the fuck?”  
“It’s because if you tell Richie, he’ll never let me live this down!” he says, completely ignoring Eddie’s surprise and the shocked laughter that comes right after. “He’ll start pointing at every bird and ask _is that a robin? oh, is that one a robin then?_ , and then he’ll move on to doing the same with school supplies, and then with every random object he sees. Before you know it, he’ll be printing pictures of robins at school and leaving them on my desk with the caption _do you find this arousing? be honest_ on every single one of them.”  
“You’ve thought about this scenario an awful lot.”  
“I have! It’s because it’s my worst nightmare,” Stan whispers, and you’d think he’d be reliving the death of his entire family or something, there’s so much quiet desperation in it. “So if you tell him about this—or the fact that I’m thoroughly enjoying wearing these short shorts, I feel very sexy—I will kill you with my bare hands. You can’t let him ruin robins for me, you understand?”  
Eddie tilts his head, frowning. “I thought I could use this information as blackmail?”  
“You can,” Stan says, “it doesn’t mean that I will not kill you. Don’t worry, though, I always threaten my friends of murder at some point. Consider this my official welcome to the Losers Club.”

Eddie smiles and tugs Stan in a proper hug. “Thanks, I guess.”

☆☆☆ 

When they get back to the rest of the Losers, Bill and Richie are already there. Richie is trying to discreetly sip from another can of beer, and missing the mark by a lot.

There’s a moment when the light falls over his face just right, and his makeup looks particularly realistic—and Eddie is mad all over again that the dickhead dressed up as a doll for Halloween just to piss him off.  
Mission accomplished. Eddie hates the ridiculous suspenders that make his shoulders look even wider, he hates seeing him in a stupid white shirt that contrasts so nicely with the black of his slicked hair—and he especially can’t stand how Richie’s eyes look without the barrier of his thick-rimmed glasses to cover the lovely shape of them. 

Oh, _fuck_. 

Eddie—and let him get away with using an olden saying, and to which he has yet to find a modern substitute or a worthy competitor—has the _trembles_ for him. 

Thankfully, a drunk Richie is annoying enough that for the rest of the night Eddie doesn’t have to worry about inappropriate feelings, busy as he is bantering and threatening to kill him if he doesn’t quit stepping on the hem of Eddie’s cape. 

They mingle some more near the Paul Bunyan statue, which Eddie finds quite creepy—but it, he thinks, would be very hypocritical of him to say so, so he keeps it to himself.  
When there are practically no more people around, apart from a few teenagers here and there smoking and minding their business, Mike fishes a bottle of clear liquid from his backpack.  
“Vodka,” he informs them with a waggle of his eyebrows. He’s long given back the Batman mask to Bill, in a circular exchange of headgear that ended with Bev’s princess crown on Eddie’s head and the cowboy hat on Ben’s. “A really shitty one, but still vodka.”

Stan, who’s trying to do the reasonable thing and sober up before he ends up either kissing someone or throwing up in a bush, is studying with Eddie all the Polaroids they’ve taken, while the others pass the bottle around like a ceremonial pipe. They even look weirdly solemn about the whole ritual.  
“You keep this one,” Stan says, and points at the photo Eddie was already eyeing: it’s the one of Richie and him. Eddie is smirking at the camera with Richie thrown over his shoulder, while the other looks back with a shocked expression on his face. The pose is ridiculous, given the height difference between them—more clear than ever with Eddie’s frame disappearing under Richie’s bigger one, and Richie’s legs barely fitting in the corners of the picture.  
“Won’t Bev get mad?” he asks, swiping his thumb over the photo.  
“No,” Stans reassures him, and he picks up the one that was balanced over his own knee for them to inspect. It’s of him and Eddie, plus the other couple of Batman and Robin, squeezed together to fit in and striking a superhero pose. “If it makes you feel better, I’m stealing this one.”  
Eddie chuckles and resolves to hide the picture of Richie and him in one of the pouches attached to his belt. 

It’s not much later that Ben wrestles the half empty bottle of vodka out of Richie’s hands.  
“Nooo,” Richie whines, making grabby hands at it, held out of his reach by Ben. “Gimme my baby back! Why are you doing this to me?”  
Ben sighs, clearly fairly drunk himself, and with some effort he manages to focus his eyes back on Richie. “Because I love you, man. You can’t—you’re super drunk, and I _love_ you.”  
Bill’s laughing openly at the exchange, laid over the bench with his head on Mike’s lap.  
“I’m surrounded by traitors,” Richie mumbles and slaps a hand on Bill’s leg to make him yelp. “Ben, why aren’t you somewhere smooching your girl, instead of stealing my alcohol, you stupid whore—”  
Bev snorts a laugh, and Eddie can’t help doing the same at how badly Richie’s slurring his words. 

It’s sort of worrying, though. Eddie has no idea how being drunk feels like—what’s normal and what isn’t—but the other Losers are evidently more sober than Richie, and they don’t seem that alarmed about his state. 

“And that’s your cue to go home,” Bev is saying. She’s tugging on Richie’s arm, who’s sitting on the grass in front of the bench and refusing to cooperate.  
Eddie makes his way closer, and easily lifts Richie back to his feet by his armpits. “Wooh, hi,” Richie says, stumbling closer to him until they’re chest to chest. He has to crane his head down to look at Eddie, they’re standing so close, and the smudged red eyeshadow on his eyes makes him look a bit sick, but Eddie still finds it incredibly attractive on him. The gel and hairspray have lost the battle against his naturally curly hair, and Eddie longs to brush it back from where it fell over Richie’s forehead.  
“I’m going to take you home,” he tells Richie, and lets his hands fall back to his side.  
Richie laughs, breathless, and Eddie chalks it up to lightheadedness. “Fuck yeah.” 

They say bye to the others, who sagely decided to wait for Bill to sober up before he drives them home, and they start walking towards Richie’s house. 

It’s not a long walk, and they blissfully don’t meet anyone who might take a look at them and be confused as to how a 5'7" guy can comfortably hold the weight of someone much taller than him and who keeps dragging his feet just to be annoying.  
When they reach their destination, Eddie is relieved to see that there’s no car parked in front of the house—Richie did mention his parents being away for a romantic date, and apparently they won’t be back for the night.

(“Romantic date...on Halloween?” Eddie asked.  
Richie just shrugged, and flashed him a smile. “They’re a weird couple.”  
“It explains a lot about how you turned out, actually,” he stated, and only nearly avoided getting a noogie by a laughing Richie.)

He fishes the house keys from Richie’s back pocket—to which the idiot responds with a slurred _dude_ , _buy me dinner first_ —and they finally stumble inside. 

Richie makes a move for the sofa in the deserted living room that suggests he’s planning on face-planting there and immediately passing out, but Eddie tugs him back. “Richie, Richie—come on, you need to get upstairs at least.”  
Richie leans heavily on his shoulder, and Eddie easily takes the weight. “Don’t wanna,” he slurs, going practically ragdoll in Eddie’s arms. Well, at least it fits his costume. 

Eddie gives up on reasoning with this drunk version of Richie and just picks him up to carry him to his room. Richie lets out a breathless _woo!_ when his feet leave the ground, and immediately snuggles closer in the circle of Eddie’s arms—his head rests on the hollow of Eddie’s shoulder, the cold tip on his nose pressed on the side of his neck, and he giggles the entire short trip from the front door to his bed. 

“Why did you get so drunk?” Eddie asks and lowers Richie on the unmade sheets. The white of them is a nice contrast against the dark brown of Richie’s hair, and the light dust of pink on his cheeks from both the cold and the alcohol.  
“I dunno,” he says. He makes a half-hearted attempt at tugging Eddie down on the bed, and Eddie complies with no second thought—Richie’s being more touchy-feely than usual, which he guesses he can blame on the fifth beer he downed not half an hour ago, but it’s not like Eddie minds the contact anyway. He really, _really_ does not mind the contact. 

“That’s not an answer, Richie,” Eddie says and leans back to slip Richie’s leather shoes off so he can be more comfortable. “You got—what’s the term? Shitfaced?”  
Richie nods, and then for some reason winks at him and does finger guns with both his hands. “Hell yeah, I did.”  
“You’re such an idiot,” laughs Eddie, fond as anything. He longs to sneak under the covers, wrap himself with the warm blankets and Richie’s arms, but he hesitates. Should he be doing something else? Is Richie going to be fine if he just sleeps this off? Oh God, is he going to get _alcohol poisoning?_

Eddie promised his friends that he would take care of Richie, and now he’s in the middle of realizing that he doesn’t know anything about anything. Did he really think he could just put on a stupid mask and pretend that he was like them, just a teenager enjoying a night out? Eddie can’t get drunk, because Eddie can’t drink, because if he did he would rust, there inside his chest that looks so human now but is nothing more than a bunch of metal parts.  
“Richie,” he says, taking his hand in his own. He shakes it a little to make Richie’s eyes focus on him. “Are you going to be okay?”  
“Whaa…? Yeah, dude.” Richie giggles again, lids heavy. “‘M just a little drunk, dumbass. Oh, shit, wait.”  
Eddie’s panic spikes. “What?”  
“My fuckin’—my fucking contacts. Need to take them off, ‘t’s bullshit. Ugh, I wanna go to sleep.”

He pushes himself up on the bed, and Eddie passes an arm around his back, hand splayed on Richie’s warm side. Richie smiles at him, a little wobbly, and then does something frankly disturbing to his eyeballs that worries Eddie for a split second, until he realizes he’s just taking off the thin disc of his contacts. 

Richie flicks them somewhere on the floor, because he’s a _caveman_. Eddie opens his mouth to chastise him, but when he turns his head and finds Richie’s face five inches from his, all the words die in his throat. There are still traces of dark red over his lids, but the rest of his doll makeup has already faded away.  
“Rich?” he murmurs. Eddie has no idea what’s going on, doesn’t dare move closer or away.  
“I can’t see you, Eds,” Richie says. “Unless I’m this close. I’m useless without glasses—isn’t, isn’t that stupid?”  
“What’s stupid?”  
“That _my_ eyes are organic and they don’t work for shit, but yours...yours are like, _glass_ and you can see just fine.”

There’s no malice in his tone, just genuine curiosity—still, now that Eddie’s been thinking about his...his _condition_ , or whatever you want to call it, it hits too close to home.  
His eyes _are_ made of glass, that’s true. Richie’s are dark as the night sky, sharp enough to cut when Richie needs them to, traitorous because they never can hide what he’s thinking, or feeling, it just all drips out no matter how thick the frame of the glasses they hide behind; and Eddie’s are—two pieces of glass. Fake eyes stuck on the fake face of his fake body. 

Does Richie want his eyes, does he believe he’d see better? Eddie will carve them out and give them to him, he just has to ask. 

It’s a disturbing thought. Where did that come from? What’s wrong with him? Richie would be horrified if Eddie said it out loud, so he bites his lip and keeps it silent. “It’s unfair, yeah,” he murmurs instead.  
Richie frowns, presses closer to Eddie’s side. “I was just jokin’. Spaghetti Man, what’s wrong?”  
“Nothing’s wrong.”  
“Yeah, something’s fucking _wrong,_ ” he argues. “I’m blind but I still can hear that’s something—fuck, I’m too drunk for this.”  
“Go to sleep, then.” Eddie gently pushes him back down on the bed, but Richie’s fingers stay hooked on the yellow belt around Eddie’s waist.  
“No, no, you’re upset! Tell me why you’re...What did I say? Always saying stupid shit, I’m sorry.” He sounds genuinely miserable, all of a sudden, and Eddie knows that it’s just the alcohol making him emotional but it still tugs at something deep inside him.  
“You didn’t say anything wrong, dumbass.”  
“Promise?”  
“Yeah, _promise_.” Eddie smiles, and Richie smiles back ( _the imperfect line of his teeth his dark curls spread on the pillow his nose still flushed red from the cold_ ) and Eddie unravels at the seams some more. “Richie?” he says.  
A sleep-heavy blink. “Mh?”  
“I don’t know if this is normal,” Eddie whispers and presses a hand to where his stomach would be, where it hurts for some reason. “I don’t know if it’s real.”  
“What do you mean?” Richie’s hand falls from the belt down on Eddie’s thigh, he feels it through the fabric of his suit like a brand. “What’s not real?”

Eddie thinks it over. “Me?” he says at last.

“Don’t,” Richie chokes out and shakes Eddie’s leg like he needs to get his attention, like he doesn’t always have it anyway. “Don’t start with that.”  
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Eddie argues. “I’m just a fake. I can walk and talk, but I’m still a, a _thing_.”  
Richie looks up at him, blur of tears over his eyes. “Who cares?” he asks, and he sounds angry and hurt and tired. “Who fucking cares that you’re not like me. You say it like—like you matter less just ‘cause you don’t have a digestive system of whatever. Eddie, I... _people_ , people care for things all the time, it’s like we can’t fucking stop. We looked at that giant rock in space and we called her Moon, and we’ve been writing poems for her ever since. Fucking poems, Eddie, and songs, for a floating thing up there who can’t hear any of it anyway. We play with stuffed animals where we’re kids, and then we grow up and still feel bad for them every time we see them lying under our beds—because what if they’re lonely and what if they’re cold and what if they’re scared?”  
“God, Eddie. I found you in Neibolt, and it took me, like, thirty seconds before I was talking to you and giving you stupid nicknames like we were old friends. And then you fucking woke up, and you told me my shirt was ugly, and I already cared about you so much, _so much_ , I didn’t even know what to do with myself. Do you think it matters? That somewhere inside there you’re metal and gears? I liked you well enough when you were still a thing. I love you well enough now.” 

For a moment Eddie’s speechless, and all he can do is just stare at Richie, one hand holding tight on his wrist, and feel the waves of affection wash over him. 

The tears pooling in Richie’s eyes finally spill over, two hot tracks down his temples, and he frees his hands from Eddie’s touch to cover his face. “S-shit,” he stutters, voice wet, “fuck, I didn’t—pretend I didn’t say—”  
Eddie bends down until he can press his face in the crook of Richie’s neck, body halfway thrown over his to hug him tight. Richie’s words die down with a gasp, and Eddie curls a hand around his bicep until Richie gets the hint and wraps his arms around Eddie’s shoulders, hugs him back.  
“I love you, too,” he says with his mouth pressed on the soft cotton of Richie’s shirt, and Eddie doesn’t know where the kind of _i love you_ the Losers so easily throw around ends and where a different, more secretive type begins but maybe, he thinks, it doesn’t matter as long as he _means_ it.

Richie sobs and squeezes their bodies closer together. “Eds,” he says, soft and still so sad, like Eddie inadvertently broke his heart. Eddie’s face is still hidden in the hollow of his neck, but he can feel the press of his lips on his hair.  
He raises his head to look at Richie and finds him already staring wide-eyed at him, gaze unfocused from the lack of glasses. “Sleep,” Eddie tells him, and wipes away the tears wetting his face with a swipe of his thumbs.  
Richie’s eyes flutter close. “‘Kay,” he says, “stay with me?”  
“I always sleep here, dumbass.”  
Finally Richie cracks a smile, if still a bit shaky, and jokingly pushes at Eddie’s shoulder. “You’re so mean. I meant like this.” He touches their knees together, and hooks one ankle behind Eddie's calf, a naked slide of skin on Eddie’s clothed leg. Eddie’s heart clenches painfully at the feeling—his heart, or his gears, or whatever else he has knocking around in his chest at this point. 

“Fine,” he says, buying himself one last second to touch Richie’s face. “I need to get out of this costume first.”  
Richie nods sleepily and lets Eddie push himself off the bed. He makes a quick work of taking off the belt, suit and heavy black boots in exchange for a warm pair of Richie’s sweatpants and a shirt way too big for his smaller frame.  
When he gets under the covers, socked feet sliding on the smooth sheets, Richie is already nodding off. Eyelids heavy, he looks at Eddie and smiles—and all Eddie can do with the thundering want inside him is keep his lips closed, scared that it’s all going to come pouring out, and shimmy closer to Richie to press their bodies together. 

_He loves me,_ Eddie thinks at every beat of Richie’s heart under his cheek. _He loves me, he loves me, he loves me…_

He falls asleep only many hours later. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 911? I FOUND TWO BOYS, THEY'RE YEARNING ALL OVER THE FLOOR! SEND HELP!
> 
> (btw the writing of chapter nine kicked my ass so I think I'll start uploading every seven days instead of five to buy myself some time. Sorry about that!)


	9. Chapter Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fuck, this place is tiny. They’re awkwardly squeezed together, one of Eddie’s arm pressed on Richie’s chest, palm spread over his collarbone, and Richie’s going to die today, right here in this dusty room with God and some cleaning supplies as his witnesses.

_November 1st, 1993_

“Richie,” Bev whispers, and pokes his thigh under the desk. “Are you okay?”

No. No, Richie’s not okay—he’d go as far as to say that his internal monologue has been nothing but a continuous scream since he remembered the events of last night a couple of hours ago.

That morning, Richie opened his eyes _way_ too early, thanks to a pounding hangover-induce migraine, but Eddie’s face was tucked in the hollow of Richie’s neck—so it was, overall, a splendid start of the day. 

He kept his limbs tangled in Eddie’s for as long as he could, reveling in the closeness and thinking filthy stuff like how he’d like to hold Eddie’s hand or kiss his forehead—then his alarm ringed, and they both got out of bed.  
For the first time since Eddie had started sleeping at his house, they didn’t have to sneak around just to get Eddie out of his bedroom unnoticed: his parents’ unseasonal romantic date included a night out in some hotel out of town, so they could have some ‘overdue privacy’, as his dad put it, a truly horrific turn of phrase because it forced Richie to acknowledge that his parents still have sex.  
So he took the opportunity to finally show Eddie his kitchen, and they chatted and joked around while Richie munched on some Fruit Loops for breakfast.  
Eddie was a lot more smiley than usual, and there was this moment when he swiped his thumb on the corner of Richie’s mouth to brush away some grains of sugar that had Richie almost choking on his cereal—but, really, he thought nothing of it. 

No, that’s a lie: he obsessed over it the entire drive to school, after dropping Eddie as close to the Clubhouse as he could.  
_Why was he acting so touchy-feely?_ Richie asked himself with the few brain cells still active after a night of drinking, and then he remembered that _Bill_ told him he’s _gay_ and crushing on _Mike_ , so that sent him down a completely different spiral. 

It was only during second period, when Richie was sort of dozing off, sort of paying attention to the Biology lesson, that a very specific memory resurfaced in his head. 

_You unlocked: drunk love confession to dear platonic friend._

_I love you well enough now._

“Oh my God,” Richie whispered in pure horror, and sank lower down his chair, wishing the ground would open up and swallow him. 

That’s when the internal screaming started, and it’s still going strong as of now. 

Beverly, from the next desk over, shoots him a questioning look.  
“Bev, I need you to meet me near the vending machines on the second floor, and then I need you to murder me on the spot,” he whispers in response.  
From the corner of his eyes, he sees one of her eyebrows raise high on her forehead, in that 2kool4skool way that Richie deeply envies her. “And why’s that?”  
“I-,” he starts, and immediately bites his lip silent. Bev already knows how Richie feels about Eddie, because he’s so fucking _obvious_ to anyone with eyes, and she’s always been able to unravel Richie’s bullshit before even he can, so _of course_ she knows. Of course he doesn’t need to be scared.

Still, fuck, he doesn’t want to talk about it. Not with Beverly, not with anyone—maybe he could with Bill, now that Richie knows what he knows, but even then being all open and vulnerable would take more effort than he’s willing to put in.

Richie knows he’s working himself up to a full-blown panic, and that isolating himself from his friends is not going to help him any, but it’s already been established that he’s not the greatest at self-care.  
To be honest, he just wants to spare himself the humiliation of asking for help.  
He _thinks_ his feelings for Eddie are this beast roaring in his chest, something too big for him to keep at bay for long—it’s hard to remember that millions before him have gone through the same, and that the world will keep on spinning whether his accidental confession will be reciprocated or not. There’s a rational part of his brain that knows it, though, and that same part is telling him that putting all his stupid bullshit over his friends’ shoulders is selfish. How could Richie confess to Bill that sometimes he thinks he’ll die if he doesn’t kiss Eddie right there and then, when Bill has been waddling through grief since he lost Georgie? How would that be fair?

“Nevermind,” Richie says. He keeps his eyes trained on the professor, knowing full well that if he looks at Beverly for too long he will break and confess everything.

Bev, because she’s a good friend, doesn’t press him further. She just hums knowingly, to inform Richie that he may not want to talk about it but it’s not like she’s not aware of everything already, and then she goes back to taking notes.

Richie survives the rest of the school day, but just barely. His thoughts are going in circle the entire time, always looping back to what he said the night before and, just as often, to the gap in his memory right after. 

How did Eddie respond? Was he weirded out, or did he assume Richie was joking, and didn’t think anything of it? Richie was being serious, with that dangerous level of honesty that drunk people can reach so easily, but he wouldn’t blame Eddie if he thought Richie was just fucking around.

Yeah, that’s probably it. And if Eddie still has doubts about it, and is maybe suspecting that Richie’s was an actual, honest-to-God, confession of his big gay love for him, then Richie could just...deny. Say that he didn’t even remember telling him that, _ahah dude I was so drunk, no way I told you I’m in love you!_ _  
_ Perfect plan. Fool proof, even. 

Who knows how Eddie would react to the truth, anyway.  
Richie can only picture improbable scenarios of violence and hurtful words, all dark scary thoughts that don’t fit Eddie at all but have been beaten into Richie’s subconscious—but he when tries to imagine a more realistic reaction, it’s too vague and nebulous in his head to decipher. Would Eddie be confused and uncomfortable? Flattered but ultimately uninterested? Would he even understand the weight of Richie’s feelings?

 _You could just ask him_ , says a voice in his head that sounds annoyingly like Stan, _you could grow a pair and ask him._

But no, hell no, he wants the topic to _die_ —he’ll honestly be happy if they don’t mention it ever again, for as long as they live, and if Richie has to spend months pining after Eddie with this doubt gnawing at him, than so be it. There are worse fates 

I’LL SHOW YOU A WORSE FATE, KIDDO

and he’s hardly the first teenager thinking his first love is the end all be all of life, right? Right.  
Even then, a problem remains: what’s making Richie feel so...disgusting? The more he dwells on it, the more grossed out by himself he is. Right now, if he caught sight of his reflection he’d probably end up punching the mirror.  
He knows himself well enough to, at least, be aware of all the things he’s repressing somewhere in the back of his mind—for example, the hope that Eddie could ever love him back is buried deep, _deep_ under half-formed comedy routines and Nintendo trivia.  
Richie thinks of how warmly Eddie smiled at him this morning, and the nausea come back tenfold. What the fuck is _wrong_ with him? Apart from the obvious, that is. 

To be fair Richie’s never made a habit of being kind to himself, tearing himself down for the sake of getting a laugh out of people without a moment’s hesitation. It took its toll after a few years, and by now there’s a voice in his brain, never silent, always chanting in the background of his thoughts, making sure he never forgets, how he’s greedy greedy _greedy_

GREEDY! GREEDY! OH, KID, YOU ASKED FOR THIS

so maybe this doesn’t have to do anything with Eddie, these are just the first stages of a breakdown Richie should have had months ago. The anxiety, the need to crawl out of his own skin, the unwillingness to let anyone else see him in this state.  
Stan had it right: see a life-size doll come to life, hyperventilate for ten minutes, get over it, become friends with him. Efficient and straight to the point, a good move on the ever-pragmatic guy that organizes his wardrobe by color.  
Instead Richie had to do everything out of order: he fell in love first, and now he can’t even look at Eddie without hearing fire alarms in his head. Eddie seems none the wiser

I WAS SLEEPING, YOU HAD TO GO AND WAKE ME UP

so Richie better count his blessings—he can hide all this teenage angst for a while, see if he can calm the fuck down on his own. Fake it till you make it, as they say.

YOU AND MY WEAKLING OF A BROTHER

Richie shakes his head, confused. He loses his train of thought and struggles to pick it up again, white noise filling his head for one disorienting moment.  
He clenches his hand tight and focuses on the bite of his nails on the skin, and waits for the vertigo to pass. 

That was—weird. It was like...words, in his—a voice, in...

Wait, what just happened? 

Richie blinks his eyes open. He doesn’t remember closing them. 

What was he talking about?

Oh, right. Eddie. 

Fake it till you make it! Act normal, pretend nothing happened.  
Too bad that Richie is too much of a pussy, and what he does instead is avoid like the plague a confrontation with Eddie by spending as little time with him as possible. Well, with him _alone._ He got into the habit of dragging at least one of the other Losers along when he goes to visit Eddie at the Clubhouse after school.

Eddie spends his mornings and afternoons there. At night he can stay with Richie, but every day, on his way to school, Richie makes a deviation to drop him off on Kansas Street, the closest point to the Clubhouse he can reach by car. Richie doesn’t really like the idea of leaving him alone for most of the day, but Eddie doesn’t seem to mind: he can be a solitary creature, at times, and he enjoys the privacy that the place offers him. If anything, he seems rejuvenated by the hours spent by himself, a polar opposite to Richie’s often exhaustingly extroverted personality.  
And the Clubhouse became quite cozy now that Eddie is around, both because he takes care of keeping it tidy and clean and because the Losers keep bringing stuff from their homes to make it more comfortable for Eddie. Blankets and pillows, old movie posters to cover the bare walls, even a twin size mattress that Ben’s mom wanted to get rid of after she bought a new bed. 

It’s now propped on a pallet, a lucky find that Bill and Stan took from Mr. Conley’s junkyard and never found a use for before Ben mentioned the mattress. Bev brought a set of sheets that her aunt wouldn’t notice are gone, and now it can be considered a real bed. One that Eddie could use if he wanted to spend the nights in what is, essentially, his home.

Neither him nor Richie mention it. He keeps sleeping in Richie’s bed every night. 

Which is when it becomes really difficult to, well...avoid Eddie. 

Richie really doesn’t mean to. It’s just that every time they’re by themselves Richie gets truly mortifying flashbacks to how he compared Eddie to the fucking _moon_ , and to how he practically sobbed _I love you_ in his arms like the drunk idiot he is, and so he gets all weird and finds every excuse to get away from Eddie. At night the sheer terror of repeating something embarrassing in his sleep is enough to keep him plastered to his own side of the mattress, and after a while Eddie starts turning his back on him as well. Richie cannot for the life of him decipher if Eddie seems more relieved or dejected at not having Richie draped over him like an octopus.

For what it’s worth, Richie misses waking up like that in the morning. 

God, why did he have to be so fucking _stupid?_

☆☆☆ 

_November 11th, 1993_

Richie pulls over on Kansas Street, sparing a glance at the houses lined up on his right to check if some nosy resident is paying his parked car any mind. The street is deserted. 

“All clear on this front, lieutenant,” Richie says, like he does every morning, but since Halloween Eddie doesn’t laugh at it anymore, so Richie should probably go fuck himself instead and spare his heart the pain. 

He turns in time to see Eddie nod, somber eyebrows frowned over his eyes in an expression that reminds Richie of how his face looked before he came to life, the melancholy angles painted with a careful hand.  
“I’ll see you later,” he says, and gets out without a smile or a brush of his hand over Richie’s shoulder or—God, Richie would be happy with that at least—a prissy jab at the state of the car, which has been the home of empty Coke cans and gum wrappers since his parents gave him permission to use it. Richie’s pretty sure they deeply regret the decision.

Richie watches Eddie’s form make his way deeper into the Barrens, eyes focused on the line of his shoulders until he disappears from sight, and then he starts the engine again and makes his way to school. 

Classes drag on and on, and Richie dutifully takes notes and doesn’t disturb any of the lessons, which makes all of his professors in equal parts pleasantly surprised and distrustful, judging from their tone every time they address him—almost like they’re convinced he’s plotting something big and outrageous. Like this is just the calm before the storm.

" _Do you feel well, Tozier?_ ”  
Yes, teach. I’m not planning to set part of the school on fire or organize an impromptu concert in the cafeteria, I swear. There’s just this guy I’ve professed my undying love to and I was so shit-faced I don’t remember what he said right after...I’ve been acting like an asshole to him for the past week and half, though, so that will hopefully balance things out. 

Can someone, _please_ , put him out of his misery?

Turns out that focusing during class in an attempt to distract himself from everything else is incredibly exhausting. It’s at 2pm, when he’s bouncing his leg under his neck hard enough for it to register on the Richter scale, that he draws the line. He needs to use some of this pent up energy before he collapses. 

Also, Stan has the face of someone who’s concentrating very hard on developing the telekinetic powers necessary to kill Richie and his bouncing leg without getting his hands dirty. It’s better for everyone if Richie leaves the classroom for a while. 

His arm springs up the moment Professor Jones raises his eyes from the textbook he’s been reading from.  
“Yes, Richie?” he asks, exasperated fondness in his voice.  
“Can I go to the bathroom?”  
“Is it urgent?”  
“It’s a matter of life and death,” Stan answers for him. The _as in, I’ll kill him if you don’t let him_ is implied but Richie hears it. Professor Jones does as well, judging from the vague hand gesture he does towards the door. 

Richie’s out of the class in T-minus five seconds. 

He wanders the hallways for a while, letting his feet lead him around without a clear destination in mind. Barely anyone is around, and the few times he hears footsteps approaching he just ducks around the corner to stay out of view.  
It’s roughly five minutes later, when he’s wondering how far he can push this theoretical-bathroom visit of his before Professor Jones sends a rescue mission after him, that he catches a glimpse of someone power walking at the end of the hallway. 

_I’m officially losing my mind,_ he thinks, because there’s having a crush and then there’s hallucinating the subject of your affection in the middle of a school day—but then the someone reappears into view and no, nope, that’s _actually_ Eddie.

“Richie!” he says, his shoulders sagging in...relief? How long has Eddie been walking around looking for him?  
“Eddie!” Richie says back, a beautiful start for what promises to be an enlightening conversation. “The fuck?”  
Eddie jogs up to him, clad in a hoodie of Richie’s that is now effectively his, he’s been wearing it so often. _Bet it smells like him now_ , Richie’s traitorous brain provides, definitely _not_ what he should be focusing on. 

Eddie’s expression is set in a determined frown, his chin high and eyes ablaze with something dangerous—or maybe it’s just the lights reflecting on the glass of his eyes.  
“What are doing here?” Richie whisper-yells, looking around to make sure no one else is approaching. “ _How_ did you even get here?”  
“I still have that map, remember? I walked here, sneaked in from a window. I need to talk with you.”  
“ _Now?_ ”  
“Yes!”  
Richie’s about to respond, although he has no idea what his mouth will say, but then he hears laughter somewhere behind them and the every other thought drags to a halt. 

Belch. And if there’s Belch then there’s Hockstetter, and if there’s Hockstetter than Bowers is, inevitably, right in front to lead the group. 

He wraps his hand around Eddie’s wrist, and unceremoniously tugs him to—to somewhere that’s not here, for fuck’s sake, anywhere but near Henry _fucking_ Bowers. 

“What the fuck, Richie?” Eddie bites out, trying to keep up with Richie’s longer strides.  
Richie turns a random corner, avoids the stairs to the second floor and ducks in the narrow hallway where the vending machines are. “No, _you_ what the fuck,” he says without even turning to look back at Eddie.  
“No, _you_ what the fuck!”  
“ _You_ what the fuck!”  
“ _You_ what the fuck! I can keep going all day, Rich—”  
“Enough,” Richie snaps, stopping in his tracks abruptly enough to make Eddie crash against his back. “We need to hide, _now._ ”  
When he faces Eddie, he finds him with his lips curved in a frown that actively calls Richie a weirdo without Eddie needing to say a word.  
Bowers & Co. make their presence known again with a second fit of obnoxious laughter, somewhere on their right and out of sight—and Richie’s got a _bad_ feeling about this, something foul-tasting in his mouth at the prospect of being caught by them, but more than anything he doesn’t want any of those fucking bullies to even set _eyes_ on Eddie. 

So he looks around for a distraction, at least, and finds the closed door of a supply closet innocently staring back at him, and he promptly shoves Eddie inside without warning. He follows suit, sliding in the remaining space as swiftly as possible, and closes the door on them with a _click_.  
“Shit, Eddie,” Richie whispers, his heart thrumming in his chest, “that was close call.”

He strains his ears, trying to detect the noise of footsteps outside the door. He hears Patrick say something that makes Belch (or is it Henry?) snicker, and then the sounds of someone sliding coins in a vending machine. Shit. They’ll be stuck in here for a while. 

“Who are we hiding from?” Eddie asks from behind him, barely a whisper, and the hairs on the back of Richie’s neck stand up at how close his voice is. 

Fuck, this place is tiny. They’re awkwardly squeezed together, one of Eddie’s arm pressed on Richie’s chest, palm spread over his collarbone, and Richie’s going to _die_ today, right here in this dusty room with God and some cleaning supplies as his witnesses.  
“From the resident Bad Guys,” he says instead of something stupid like _what if we kissed in front of this bottle of Mr Clean Extra Strength Bleach?_

Uh. Maybe Eddie would like that, kissing near antibacterial products. Richie loves him to death, but the guy’s a neat freak. 

“Who, that Bowers you guys told me about?” Eddie asks, voice still pinched low. “Let me see,” he says, and starts pushing and pulling at a swearing Richie until he’s the one pressed on the door, bent down so he can spy the outside from the keyhole.  
He’s fucking— _bent over_ in front of him like it’s nothing, and Richie feels another part of his soul leave his body forever. 

Thankfully, blissfully, Eddie huffs an annoyed _I can’t see shit_ and stands back up straight. It gains them some more space to put between their bodies, but not nearly enough to keep this middle-school-dance appropriate—and so what if Richie is all hunched down closer to Eddie? It’s not his fault if there are shelves full of boxes above his head, he _needs_ to crowd over him if he doesn’t want to risk a concussion. 

Still, Richie’s acutely aware of every point of their bodies touching. It’s been ten days since he let himself be this close to Eddie, so who can blame him?  
The line of his back pressed on Richie’s chest, a bony elbow jammed in his side in a way that should hurt, but doesn’t because it’s _Eddie_ , Eddie touching him, and Richie is once again swept away by the intensity of his own feelings. They snarl in his chest, demanding attention, they push at his ribs from the inside, stealing his breath—and why _now_?  
Richie’s hit by them like this sometimes, ‘cause there’s not a moment when he doesn’t know he’s head over heels for Eddie, but most of the time it’s a dormant knowledge that lays in the back of his mind. Other times, it’s so intense he doesn’t know what to do with himself. 

This is a very bad moment for it.  
They’re stuck in a fucking supply closet like in some harlequin novel his grandma might enjoy, if the characters in an harlequin novel risked being beaten to a pulp if they were found out. Richie is _sure_ that Bowers caught a glimpse of them when they turned the corner, and Richie won’t be lucky a third time—if he gives Henry the chance to corner him again, Richie won’t get to keep all his teeth in his mouth.

So Richie closes his eyes tight before he does something unacceptable like sniffing Eddie’s hair (not that he hasn’t done that before, on one too many occasions when he woke up before Eddie did), and focuses solely on a lonely broom crammed next to the door.  
He clears his throat. “Welcome to my office,” he says in the nasally voice of the school’s headmaster, “please take a sit. What matter did you want to discuss today?”  
“Har har, very funny,” Eddie bites back, and cranes his neck so he can glare at him. “You know what I want to talk about.”  
Richie clenches his fist near his side where Eddie can’t see, his nails digging painful half-moons in his palm. He really does not want to have this conversation, especially now that he feels so—so vulnerable. “Do I?”  
“Yes, you do!,” Eddie groans, turning back to face the door. “You forced me to corner you here, Richie, because I knew it would be the only place where…” He trails off, sighing. All the tension that he carried on his shoulders suddenly gives away, and when he next speaks his tone has lost all bite. “You’re avoiding me, I don’t understand.”  
“I’m not avoiding you,” Richie responds with an awkward laugh. “We literally sleep in the same bed every night, remember?”

Eddie digs his elbow deeper in Richie’s ribs, and Richie takes the half-step back that the room allows with a pained _oof_. The only thing it does is put a few meager inches between them, so that when Eddie turns on his feet to face him, Richie’s caught in a sharp intake at how Eddie’s hip drags over his crotch. He fervently hopes the closet is too dark for Eddie to see the pitiful state Richie’s in.

Now pressed chest-to-chest, Richie has to look straight down if he wants to hold eye-contact—which, if he’s honest, is not something he’s too keen on at the moment. If his hair were long enough, he’d hide behind his bangs and pretend none of this was happening in the first place.  
But Richie’s a weak man, always been, and an idiot to booth, so he _does_ look down, and he _does_ catch Eddie’s eyes. 

_We’re so close_ , he thinks, breathless even in his mind, and _I could kiss him._ So, so easily. Tilt his head, lean down just enough, finally figure out what Eddie’s perfect teeth feel like under his tongue. 

He’s quickly brought back from the fantasy by Eddie’s eyes, the only thing in the whole room that reflects the light, so that even through the thick shadows Richie can see the genuine sadness in them. They give the illusion of being full of tears, and although Richie knows that they aren’t because Eddie can’t physically cry, his stupid heart doesn’t listen, and it sinks down to his stomach. 

“Stop. God, just stop,” Eddie says. His hands go to clutch at Richie’s shirt, and Richie flinches back—expecting what, exactly, he doesn’t know. “I’m not stupid, okay? I may...Richie, I’m still learning how to be human, many things are still so confusing to me. People, friendship—fucking _feelings_ , they’re so hard to understand. And you’re the only point of reference for me, Rich, you can’t just do this to me. I thought everything was okay and then one day you started acting _weird_ , and distant, and I’m so lost because I don’t know what changed.” He drops Richie’s gaze, and focuses on a point somewhere behind his shoulder, his lips just a thin line over his pale face. “I’m sorry if I did something wrong, okay? Why won’t you just talk to me?”

Richie wants to hug him, to tuck Eddie’s head under his chin and crack jokes until he laughs, because he can’t bear to hear him so distraught—but he knows he can’t deflect this time. He owes Eddie that much. “You didn’t do anything.”  
“Then what the fuck?”  
“I don’t know what the fuck, Spaghetti.” He smiles, genuine if a little wobbly, and wraps his ringed fingers around Eddie’s wrists. If not a hug, then at least this, a deliberate contact between them  
( _please, please, don’t pull back)_   
for comfort, to make Richie feel grounded.  
“Do you want to hear a life truth from a seventeen year old?” he says. “Life is just as fucking confusing for everyone else as well—you didn’t get the same headstart to figure _that_ out like the rest of us, but there you go, now you’re up to speed. Don’t think for a second I’ve got my shit together any more than you.”

Eddie finally smiles—barely a tug at the corner of his lips, but it’s there, and Richie can breathe a little easier in the dusty air of the room. “Richie. We’re friends, aren’t we? Did I get that part right, at least?”  
“Yeah, of course,” Richie says, soft as anything. “Eddie, please, don’t tell Stan, but I think you’re my _best_ friend.”

And the thing is, it’s almost the truth. ‘More than a friend’ would be a better definition, probably, but Richie’s never understood how the two things can be put on a scale like that.  
_I love you like a brother, I love you like a friend. I’m in love with you._ _  
_ To say that one is more than, is to say that the other are somehow _less_. The way he loves Stan, or Bev, or any of the others is not less than the way he loves Eddie—but if one is like soaking up the sun in the placid waters of the Quarry; then the other is an ocean wave come tumbling down over him, is searing hot water washing down his chest when he turns the dial all the way up in the shower.  
_I’m in love you_ is more intense, yes, veering often on too much—but the thing is, if the most he can be for Eddie is a best friend, he’ll wear the title with honor. 

“You’re my best friend, too,” Eddie says, as though he can Richie’s mind. “It probably doesn’t sound like much, uh? I know six people total.”  
Richie huffs a laugh, and finally succumbs to the urge of leaning down and pressing their foreheads together. “It means more than I can put into words,” he whispers, voice low and wet. He slides his hands from Eddie’s wrist, up to his shoulders, and the irony is not lost on him when he realizes there’s nothing friendly about the touch. “I’m sorry, Eds. I didn’t want to be shitty with you, I just—don’t understand feelings either. Fucking stupid, that’s what they are.”  
Eddie giggles, and tugs Richie in a proper hug. “Fucking stupid,” he echoes, face pressed on Richie’s shoulder. 

The moment is, unsurprisingly, ruined by Bowers. 

Richie sort of forgot they were hiding from him in the first place, so it comes almost as a shock when the sound of footsteps filters through their door, and he realizes Henry and the others are walking by right in front of them.  
“You’re not coming?” Richie hears Patrick say. Eddie stays stock still in Richie’s arms.  
The crunching of a plastic cup. Rubber soles squeaking on the tile floor. “Nah. You guys go, I’ll take another coffee.”  
“Henry, we already skipped a period, someone will—”  
“Did I fucking ask? Just go, I really don’t give a fuck.”  
Richie imagines Patrick and Belch raising their hands in surrender, and then getting the fuck away from Henry before he loses his already precarious temper. Richie wishes it could be that easy for Eddie and him as well. 

Outside the door, Henry gruntles something that sounds eerily like _I know they’re somewhere here—_ Eddie must hear it too, because his hands tighten around Richie’s middle. 

Silence for a few moments. Richie almost breathes a sigh of relief before he realizes Bowers just walked a few steps down the hallway to open the doors of the unused classes, three or four in a row, if Richie remembers correctly, very few before he reaches the supply closet they’re actually hiding in.  
A door creaks open, ten seconds pass, the click of it being closed again—a second time, the sounds sharper cause he’s getting closer, and the another— 

Richie makes the split decision to slip out of the room. He closes the door behind him before Eddie can do something extremely stupid like follow him out, and Henry stops in his tracks at the sound. 

He turns around, and spots Richie still standing there, who’s trying his hardest not to look as scared as he feels.  
“Tozier,” Bowers spits out, a grin stretching over his face. “I knew you were in there.”  
_Me, in the closet? Never!_ Richie almost says, just to sign his death sentence, but his conscience—who sounds like Stan, his own personal eye-rolling Jiminy Cricket, invites him to shut the fuck up. 

Bowers makes his way closer to him, dragging his leather boots in the floor at every step. For a split second Richie has the impression that he’s being pulled along by invisible strings, but the _oh shit_ feeling that comes with every interaction with Bowers distracts him from it.  
“Who you got in there?” Henry asks, eyeing the door behind Richie’s back.  
“Your mom,” Richie responds immediately, because his mouth and his brain exist on two very different planes of existence.  
Bowers just snickers. “As if you could get it up for my mom, fag.”  
“Wow, she’s that ugly?”  
Richie’s hit with a punch to the stomach, and he grasps at Henry’s shoulders as he bends over in pain. Bowers digs his fingers on the side of his face, and it’s all a direct mirror of what happened in the bathroom months ago—Henry’s moves and Richie’s _sheer_ stupidity—expect that behind a closed door there’s Eddie, still hidden, instead of a professor ready to save Richie’s ass.  
Henry’s breath smells like old cigarette smoke and cheap beer. “First of all she’s a woman. Ever heard of them? And second, she’s really fucking _dead_ , Tozier,” he says, “now get back to the program. Who the fuck. Is in there?”  
“No one’s there,” Richie manages to say through the painful hold Henry has on his jaw. “I was hiding ‘cause I didn’t want any of this bullshit to happen.”

He pushes on Henry’s shoulders hard enough to make him stumble back. Heart thundering in his chest, he resists the urge to worriedly glance at the door, and raises instead to his full height. He needs to keep Bowers’ attention on him, to piss him off enough that he forgets about everything else—Richie can take a punch to the face. He won’t let the same happen to Eddie.  
“Did you just _push_ me?” Henry asks, offended as if the concept of someone daring to fight back has never even crossed his mind. Richie surges forward and shoves him again.  
“Whatcha gonna do about it?” he provokes.  
Bowers growls at him, bloodshot eyes zeroing in on Richie. The soles of his feet squeal when he steps forward, and the sound echoes in the deserted hallway—before Richie can react, his head has already hit the door, and in the second it takes for the ringing in his ears to stop, Henry crowds on him. 

They fight and struggle and even claw at each other, each trying to gain the upper hand, and it’s nothing like the glamorous fight scenes in the action movies Bill likes to watch, but it’s just as exhausting.  
“Were you slutting it up with your boyfriend?” Henry snarls somewhere near Richie’s face.  
Richie scratches at the exposed skin of Bowers’ wrist, and it earns him just enough space to take in a much needed breath. “Shut the fuck up, just _shut up_. Get some new fucking material.”  
“So you were!” Henry laughs, loud and abrasive. “With that other faggot friend of yours—the new, shiny one. Been keeping you busy all summer, uh?”

Richie’s blood goes cold in his veins. He’s talking about Eddie, he must be—but how? Haven’t they been careful? How’s is it possible that Bowers saw them together?  
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he says instead, feigning indifference.  
“Oh yes you do, yes you _do_.” His hand shoots to Richie’s neck, and he presses against his trachea. Richie gasps for air, scratches again at Henry’s wrist until he draws blood, but Henry seems to barely notice—and _what’s happening to him?_ , Richie thinks, _that wasn’t his voice._ The way Henry spit out that _yes_ _you do_ was bone-chilling, a vicious snarl that Richie’s never heard in the mouth of another human being.  
“You thought I wouldn’t notice, but I did,” Bowers keeps going. Richie’s vision is going black. How is it possible that no one’s passing through this fucking hallway?  
The door handle starts rattling behind Richie’s back, where it was digging painfully on his spine, and Richie realizes that Eddie is trying to get out.  
“I did! I did! I did!” Henry says, shouts in Richie’s face, his tone so alien that Richie convinces himself he must be hallucinating it from the lack of oxygen. “I did! I did notice! My brother thought I’d let it slide but I will eat him whole instead, you’ll just have to wait and see!”

Brother? Henry doesn’t have a brother.

Nevermind, God, never-fucking-mind, Richie’s going to die here and now if Henry doesn’t let go, here in front of a locked closet door, and oh, the irony! He can’t even appreciate it because he’s too busy getting his airways crushed.  
There’s the pounding sound of someone banging from the inside of the room, and not-Henry’s voice filling his ears over the desperate rushing of blood, and the deafening silence from all the people who are not here to make sure Richie doesn’t die at seventeen in a town he hates, and then—

Then the bells rings. Henry’s hand drops from his neck. 

Richie sucks in a huge gulp of air, lungs burning, and desperate coughs wreck his chest.  
Bowers just looks at him, blinking owlishly, and the he just—leaves. He turns on his heels as the first classroom door at the end of the hallway opens, like he’d just been walking by by pure coincidence. Like Richie won’t have bruises on his neck in the shape of his hand in a few hours.

“Richie. _Richie!_ ” 

It’s Eddie’s alarmed voice, muffled by the door and the continuous pounding of his fists on it. Richie stops coughing long enough to turn around and get in the supply closet with him again, hopefully before any of the students trickling out of their classes notice him.  
Eddie immediately crashes him in a hug that’s a tad too tight for someone who’s still struggling to breathe, but Richie doesn’t say anything and hugs him back instead.  
“Richie, _fuck_ ,” Eddie says, “what happened? Was that Bowers?”  
Richie leans down some more, trying to make himself smaller so he can hide his face in the crook of Eddie’s neck. He squeezes his eyes shut, teeth sinking in his bottom lip, trying his best to regain some control before answering. “Unfortunately, yes,” he manages to get out after a long minute of silence, broken only by his ragged breaths. His throat hurts when he speaks.  
Eddie wraps his arms tighter around his shoulders. “Is he always like that? He sounded—”  
“Fucking insane? Yeah, no, that was unusual. That’s a word for it.”  
“Rich, what’s wrong with your voice? Did he fucking _choke_ you?”  
“Not successfully.”  
“Don’t say shit like that,” Eddie snaps, voice barely above a whisper but thick with anger. “That was so fucking scary,” he says, gesticulating wildly and almost hitting Richie in the face in the process. “I couldn’t see what what was going on. I couldn’t get out, I wanted to help you!”  
Richie scoofs, despite the pain in his throat. “And what, have Bowers fuck you up as well? I’m glad you were stuck in here.”  
“I’m strong, Richie! I’m stronger than you!”  
“Fuck me for wanting you to stay safe, I guess.”  
“You don’t _get_ to decide, that’s the whole fucking point.” Eddie catches Richie’s gaze in those warm brown eyes of his, and Richie can’t seem to be able to look away. The frustration slowly leaves them, replaced by something fond and sad. Maybe it’s just the ever-present melancholy curve of his eyebrows. Richie’s heart clenches all the same. “I told you I—I care about you, too, Richie.”  
Richie sighs, a hand going to take off his glasses to make the world blurry and unfocused, in the childhood belief that he won’t be seen if he himself can’t see. “Can we please not do this now? Speaking hurts.”  
“I’m sorry.”  
“Not your fault.”  
Eddie touches the tip of his shoe to the side of Richie’s—a peace offering, a minimal point of contact. They have squeezed themselves to the opposite sides of the small room, bodies firmly in their respective space. Weird how there didn’t seem to be this much of it before. It’s possible that Richie was just looking for excuses to stay closer

GREEDY GREEDY GREEDY BOY I’LL GET YOU NEXT TIME

but now he finds himself grateful that he can’t feel the line of Eddie’s shoulder press on his chest. He can breathe more easily through his coughs.   
“It sort of is,” Eddie says. “I shouldn’t have come here.”  
His glasses creak menacingly when Richie clenches his fingers around them too hard. _It’s my fucking fault for vomiting my feelings all over you and then treat you like trash for ten days_ , he means to say, knows that he should say, just to get it out there and see if it takes some weight off his aching lungs. He can’t. He doesn’t. “Let’s just go home,” he says instead.  
“Now? Don’t you have lesson?”  
Richie puts his glasses back on, slipping on a smile at the same time. Class-clown Tozier fully back in action. “You think I can go to class looking like this?,” he snickers, showing off what he’s sure are very impressive bruises on his neck. “Also, fuck this school. Let’s go for a ride.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GUYS. This chapter was so mean to me, I could NOT make it work. I sincerely hope it was worth the wait lmao  
> Anyway, now that my posting schedule is officially fucked, I'll do my best to update regurarly. If I take more time than anticipated I'll add a summary of the lastest chapter like I did for this one, so the people who subscribed don't need to re-read anything just to remember what the hell was going on in the story. 
> 
> As always, feedback is my only source of nourishment. 1 comment = 1 full meal


	10. Chapter Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> People have loved Eddie before, when he couldn’t do anything about it—sometimes in the wrong ways. And now that they’re gone ( was that really all my fault? ), now that despite all odds he’s loved again and can love right back, it feels impossibly selfish to ask for more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry! I'm late! Here's a 9k update.

They wait until the hallway is deserted again before risking leaving the safety of the supply closet. 

Richie keeps coughing and clearing his throat at a frequency that Eddie finds worrying, but Richie assures him he’s going to be fine as soon as he can drink something warm. Eddie doesn’t know if he can believe him.

He, however, wins the battle on who gets to step out of the room first to check if someone is still milling around, despite how much Richie huffs and puffs and insists he should be the one to do it.  
Eddie’s sick of feeling fragile—he’s been worrying about it since the day he woke up, and now that he knows he’s not going to break at every wrong move, he refuses to let people around him sacrifice themselves just to keep him safe. Which Richie has done plenty of today, if you ask Eddie.  
Even if that wasn’t the case, at the moment, _Eddie_ ’s the one who will raise fewer eyebrows if he’s caught red-handed sneaking out; Richie’s neck is quickly becoming a mess of purple bruises, and he looks, as he’s been joking about for the past ten minutes with a croaky voice, “like the poster child for domestic abuse.” Or like he’s a fan of really kinky sex, he added—whatever _kinky_ means in this context.

If kinky sex includes getting almost choked to death, Eddie doesn’t think he’s interested. Other sex stuff, however, he’s, well. Uh.

Nevermind. _So_ not the moment to think about that.  
He really doesn’t need to add ‘sex with Richie’ into the mix of thoughts already tumbling around between his gears. How would that even work, anyway? They can’t—it’s not like Eddie has— _anyway_. 

Eddie’s gone through more emotions in the last two hours than in his entire life—and the majority of them being really unpleasant ones at that. Although he’s happy he solved things with Richie, because he couldn’t have survived another silent night lying awake next to him, trying to figure out what he did wrong, there’s something in particular that’s troubling Eddie. Somewhere under the sheer horror of seeing the state Richie is in, a question keeps popping up: why couldn’t Eddie get out of the door?

It wasn’t locked, he’s sure of it. There was no key. 

So why couldn’t Eddie push it open? Richie’s weight on it shouldn’t have been enough to stop him, and it’s not like Henry Bowers knew he was trying to get out, he was too busy yelling nonsense in Richie’s face to notice—but to Eddie it felt immovable, like a rock had been pushed against it, something too massive for even Eddie’s mechanical force. He kept pushing and pushing and it didn’t move an _inch_ , while Eddie was getting more and more desperate to get out and put a stop to whatever was happening to Richie. 

So not something pushing back from the outside, struggling against Eddie’s own strength, no—more like a giant holding it close with the thoughtless touch of one finger, oblivious or perhaps indifferent to who he was keeping locked in. 

He shakes the image away. Where had that come from? 

They finally succeed in getting out of Richie’s school without being seen, waiting around corners when the sound of the heeled shoes of some professor loomed closer and making their final escape via a bathroom window that faces the parking lot on the back.  
Richie’s shoulders sag in relief as soon as his feet touch the ground outside, and he gives Eddie a half-hearted thumbs up. Seeing as he evidently doesn’t give a shit anymore about being seen sneaking out (he’s probably thinking what Eddie is, which is that no professor or janitor gives enough of a shit to chase them on their way to Richie’s car just to ask where they hell they think they’re going), Eddie relaxes as well. 

They get to Richie’s car—well, his mom’s—in companionable silence, something that Eddie is not used to when they’re together. The lack of incessant banter is the best indicator that Richie is still in pain, no matter how blasé about the whole situation he’s trying to be—so Eddie swallows back all questions and comments and stays silent as they walk alongside. Their hands nearly brush at every step. 

When Richie unlocks his car with unsure fingers and they both get in, Eddie can’t avoid the conversation anymore. He needs to tell Richie what was happening from his point of view, because he can’t for the life of him find a reasonable answer. 

He shifts in his seat, unsure how to approach the subject.  
“What’s up, buddy?” Richie croaks, voice rough but a smile tugging at his lips. He’s looking at Eddie with an arched eyebrow, head thrown back against the headrest.  
“You shouldn’t talk, it puts strain on your throat.”  
“Shut up, you’re not my real dad. Just tell me what’s got you so shifty.”  
“Apart from the fact that you’re obviously still freaked out and I have no idea how to help?” Eddie snaps, feeling useless and angry at himself—all of this was his fault, Richie would have been safe and bored in some class by now, with no bigger problem than what to eat for lunch, if it wasn’t for Eddie’s stupid idea of cornering him at school. And all because Eddie couldn’t deal with feeling ignored by him! 

Richie’s smile stretches wider. “You could kiss it better,” he says. His tilts his head to look at him from the corner of his eye, and his lashes are long enough to brush against the lens of his glasses and his neck is stretched for Eddie to see, the lines of his tendons and the bruised skin, and Eddie _does_ want to kiss him better, would do it if there was less careless teasing in Richie’s voice. He puts his hands between his knees and presses them closed instead, tight enough to be painful.  
“Shut up,” Eddie says. “And keep shutting up, dumbass, give your voice a rest.” He watches Richie pretend to zip his mouth and throw away the key, and Eddie smiles despite himself. If there’s one thing he’s grateful to Richie for, ignoring all the bigger, more obvious things, is that he always knows how to break the tension.

“I tried to get out to help you,” Eddie starts, brows frowning as he looks for the right words. “I really wanted to, Richie—but _something_ was keeping me in.”  
He goes on to explain what happened, half-hoping to hear Richie interrupt him with a scoff and offer a perfectly reasonable explanation—then again, it’s quite ironic that Eddie of all people to wish for the supernatural not to be involved at all. He would still be an _it_ if the supernatural hadn’t taken some interest. 

Richie just nods. He clears his throat and wraps his long fingers around the wheel, black nail polish and silver rings in place as usual. “There’s something really fucking weird going on in this town.”  
“Yeah, well,” Eddie says, and looks down at himself, “I’m well aware.”  
“No, no, not just you. The force you were describing, I think it was— _possessing_ Bowers, or something.”  
Eddie’s eyes go wide. “You felt it, too? It must be the same thing that brought me to life, right?”  
“I...I don’t know, Eds. I don’t think so,” Richie says, briefly glancing at him before going back to staring out of the windshield. His voice is still low and raspy, and Eddie’s torn between the need to sooth his pain and the burning rage at Henry Bowers for daring to hurt him like this. “Mike did some research, and he found out what happened to Sonia and Dr. K. And—and Edward, as well.”

Eddie shifts closer to him on the seat, confused at the non-sequitur. His hand instinctively shoots out to grasp at Richie’s forearm. “What? When? _What?_ ”  
“Geez, relax, Spaghetti,” Richie croaks out. “It’s not like we have _proof_ or anything. But, I mean—I’m starting to put some pieces together, and they fit pretty well.”  
“Rich, if you don’t just fucking tell me—”  
“So fucking bossy. Mike went through old local newspapers, and apparently there was a string of homicides related to the circus you and Dr. K performed at. Edward died— _disappeared_ , when the circus was in town; the same happened to your parents years later.”  
Eddie physically recoils at the words. “They were not my parents,” he blurts out, harsh, meaning _I wasn’t their son, not the real one._ _  
_ “Weren’t they?” Richie asks, spying Eddie through the dark curls that keep falling over his eyes.  
_I think I loved them like parents._ “Absolutely not.”  
“Well, okay then. Sorry. Do you want to hear the rest?”  
“No, Richie, I’d like to stretch this out some more. See if I spontaneously combust out of sheer frustration.”  
“With all the weird shit going on, I wouldn’t rule that out.”  
“Better get to the fucking point, then.”  
“Fuck you, I liked you better when you were all worried about my health.” He turns to pout at Eddie, but he must find something in his face that makes him give up on the teasing, because he just sighs and closes his eyes. “I think that whoever—or _what_ ever—was killing people in the circus is connected to you—it knows about you, at least. It’s too much of a coincidence, Eds, I’m sorry.”

 _Connected to me._ Is Richie trying to tell him, as kindly as he can, that the only family Eddie has ever known died because of him?  
This day already feels incredibly long. 

“We shouldn’t jump to any conclusion,” he says, trying to convince himself as much as Richie. “It’s also reasonable to think that they _aren’t_ connected.”  
“I—maybe you’re right. I hope you are, because the other option is that something wants you dead. Or, back to not being alive, whatever.” A fit of coughs interrupts him, and there are two long minutes where Richie tries to regain his breath, and Eddie does his best not to start tearing his own hair out.  
He rubs a hand over Richie’s shoulder, squeezes as close to him as the car will allow, and it’s nothing useful, but Richie doesn’t push him away.  
“I’m okay, I’m good,” Richie says after a while, waving a hand as if to disperse Eddie’s worry lingering in the air. “Bowers...well, it wasn’t Bowers, whatever was _in_ Bowers, kept saying that it noticed, and it sounded pissed about it.”  
“Noticed what? Me?” he asks, and Richie nods. “Well, it’s not like I was trying to be noticed. I didn’t even ask to be here in the first place.”

Richie back goes stiff under Eddie’s hand, and he clenches the wheel so tight the leather squeaks under his fingers. “ _You_ didn’t,” he says, voice tight.  
Eddie frowns. “What does that mean?”  
“Nothing, it’s stupid,” mutters Richie, fiddling with the car keys. He keeps going before Eddie can interject, words flowing fast out of his mouth, at a speed to rival Eddie’s own. “It doesn’t matter if you didn't ask for any of this, okay? I won’t let a fucking...murderous clown, or whatever it is, send you back to not being...to not being. Fuck _that_.”  
Richie’s studied delivery on that last part makes Eddie huff a laugh, but also acts as a warning not to press on the matter any longer. 

He knows Richie by now: when he starts speaking like he’s performing, there’s no chance of getting a clear, honest answer out of him. It’s like pulling teeth, there’s no chance: Richie won’t drop the persona when there’s some invisible audience to entertain.  
So “Fuck that,” Eddie echoes, and despite everything the smile on his lips is genuine. 

They hold eyes for a moment, staring fondly at each other for no reason other than there's love sitting comfortably in their chest, and they're together, and maybe they're not safe but at least they're here. Or, that's what Eddie's thinking—he might be projecting. Who knows what goes on behind Richie’s glasses when he’s not busy cracking jokes at the speed of light. 

The second passes, the tension breaks (was there any tension or is Eddie just full to the brim with—with—), and Richie pinches Eddie's cheek between forefinger and thumb before turning the car on. Eddie starts fiddling with the radio setting, his fascination for this modern version not yet sated, until an unfamiliar song catches his attention. 

_Umm, you're packed and you're stacked 'specially in the back_

_Brother, wanna thank your mother for a butt like that_

Richie laughs and bobs his head, singing along to the rest of the lyrics, each one more sexual and ridiculous than the previous. Eddie just hums along when he learns the basic melody and notices with great relief that Richie is not coughing every few seconds anymore. His voice is going back to the usual obnoxious cadence that Eddie loves to hate. 

The windows are rolled down, there's a pleasant breeze in their hair and the sun, lazy and unseasonably warm, curls over Eddie's skin like a sleepy cat.  
It seems impossible that not even an hour ago he was fearing for Richie's life, that before that Eddie was confessing he's lost without him, wishing tears could pool in his eyes and spill over his face with some of the _things_ he was feeling and couldn't stop feeling. Harder yet to remember how awkward Richie was acting around him just this morning, now that he's there next to him singing badly along to a song Eddie's never heard before.

God, but is he beautiful. His neck is an ugly mess of blue and purple, his curls all tangled, his smile too wide on his face, all teeth and crooked lines, and Eddie's seen painting after painting in that book about the Louvre Bev showed him, and not a single one of them holds a candle to Richie in that moment. 

Eddie loves him. Richie loves him back, he said it first if only that one time. Is it enough, to drive around with him and to argue with him and to feel human with him, more flesh, less cold, cooked dirt painted to be pretty? If there’s a looming presence threatening to take it all away, shouldn’t this be more than enough—shouldn’t Eddie think it’s everything?

People have loved Eddie before, when he couldn’t do anything about it—sometimes in the wrong ways. And now that they’re gone ( _was that really all my fault?_ ), now that despite all odds he’s loved again and can love right back, it feels impossibly selfish to ask for more. 

Richie turns to him, a brief look before Eddie's shouting at him to watch the road, and then he's laughing again and pretending to drive with his eyes closed, because he's an _idiot_ , and Eddie thinks _but I do want more I want it all I want him I want him I want him._

☆☆☆ 

Eddie thought things would go back to normal. He really did. 

After driving to the outskirts of town, Richie put the car in park on the side of a deserted country road that, as he explained, leads to Mike’s farm but has remained mostly unused for many a year.  
They stayed there for hours, and Eddie pretended to believe that it was because it was a lovely afternoon and the radio was playing the top 20 of the rock chart, and not because Richie’s legs were still shaking from Bowers’ attack and he didn’t want his parents to see him in that state. 

They talked like they normally would, an endless stream of banter and ridiculous _Would you rather?_ questions—but the conversation inevitably fell back to what their ‘cosmic enemy’ might be, and whether or not Bozo The Murder Clown From Space was an acceptable name for it.  
“How can you joke about this?” Eddie asked, punching Richie’s arm hard enough to make him yelp when he started laughing. “We don’t even know if this thing and the circus are connected, let alone if it was a clown.”  
“Jesus, Eds,” he responded, rubbing his bicep. “I’m trying to add some levity to this shit, I guess I’ll go fuck myself.”  
Eddie just rolled his eyes, unimpressed. “Just admit you’re scared of clowns for some reasons, you weirdo. And don’t call it that, anyway!”  
“I’m sorry if I was being disrespectful to the thing that wants us dead. What do you propose?”  
“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “Simply It?”  
Richie hummed. “Like, capital-letter-I It?”  
“Sure.”  
“Minimalistic—not really my style. Could be worse, though.”  
“Yeah,” Eddie deadpanned, “could be Bozo The Murder Clown From Space.”  
“Fuck you, dude,” Richie said, and when he heard Eddie mutter _fucking mouthful, as well_ he laughed—and immediately grimaced, a hand going to massage his throat. He was trying so hard to play it cool, but Eddie knew he was still hurting. 

What followed was a disastrous return home where Maggie started crying at the sight of Richie’s neck and Eddie almost got busted sneaking up the stairs on his way to Richie’s room. After that, weeks of endless research with the other Losers.  
“It” became the official name of the thing they were...hunting, for a lack of a better word. Not that having a name helped them in the slightest: they discovered only what Mike already knew, which is to say that whatever It is was far too young—or far too ancient, and Eddie believes that theory the most—to appear in any of the books they have access to. Even their constant hogging of the computers available in the library for personal use didn’t prove useful, and if anything the onslaught of contradicting information the Internet (the _Internet_! The word alone still sounded incredibly mysterious to Eddie) confused them even more. 

Still, the fruitless research occupied Eddie’s mind enough that for a while he didn’t notice Richie’s weird mood swings whenever they hung out. 

When he started noticing he couldn’t seem to stop.  
They’d be sitting side by side in the library (Eddie is, by now, human-looking enough to get away with spending time in public even without a cheap Batman mask to save the illusion), and then Richie would look at Eddie, _really_ look at Eddie, and would practically run away with some excuse.  
Eddie would smile at him and Richie would smile back, teeth flashing white and eyes warm behind the lenses, and one second later the smile would drop, and he’d go ghostly pale in the face. 

What hurts Eddie the most is how every morning they would find themselves tangled in each other, and how every morning, immediately upon waking up, Richie inevitably jumps back as if repulsed.  
It didn’t use to be like that. Eddie has taken to lying stock-still the rare mornings he opens his eyes before Richie, just to enjoy a while longer the way their bodies fit together so effortlessly now that Eddie is softer, pliable to the touch in a way that still surprises him. 

Maybe that’s the problem, he reasons—maybe Richie is less comfortable around him now that he looks and feels like a normal boy.  
Don’t think Eddie hasn’t noticed that Richie doesn’t act with his other friends the way he acts— _used_ to act—with Eddie. The pats on the back and playful mock-fighting are common practice with Bill or Stan or Ben as well, sure, but none of the lingering hugs of ruffling of hair; Eddie’s never seen Richie cuddling with Mike or cupping the back of Bev’s neck when they have to part ways.  
Eddie never realized how much he liked comfortably existing in close quarters with Richie until Richie went and put what felt like miles and miles between them.  
It’s only natural for Eddie to reach the conclusion that Richie just...doesn’t want that with him anymore, that the minimal space they’ve been operating in since that fateful July morning is now too constricting for him.

It makes sense, though, doesn’t it?  
Eddie was barely more than a doll, then. And dolls are meant to be dressed up and carried around and played with for as long as you find it entertaining—that’s all Eddie’s ever known, being gawked and marveled at by people who stopped caring about him the moment he couldn’t do his little magic trick anymore.  
He recoils from his own thoughts. Dumping Richie in that same category is beyond unfair, and the situation they’re in right now is not only drastically different, but also uncharted territory for the both of them.  
Still. The thought enters his brain and refuses to leave.  
He notices, not long after, that Richie pulls away from him whenever Eddie reminds him, even unconsciously, that he’s growing more and more human with time. 

One evening, as he’s looking for his shoes, he finds a handheld mirror under Richie’s bed, covered in dust like it’s been sitting there for a while. Richie is still downstairs having dinner with his parents, so Eddie busies himself by cleaning it until his own image on the silver-coated glass is crystal clear. 

There’s no mirror in the Clubhouse, and because he has no reason to use the bathroom here in Richie’s house, it’s been a while since Eddie has seen his own reflection. He’s briefly shocked by what he finds: every sign of suture is long gone, and his skin is no longer shiny—all things he’s noticed on the rest of his body, sure, but when the last image of his own face he has comes from the black and white photos Mike showed him, the difference still leaves quite the impression on him.  
He spends a good twenty minutes watching himself in the mirror, contorting his mouth and eyebrows whichever way for the simple reason that now he can.  
The most obvious thing, however, is how his hair is noticeably longer now—it’s starting to curl behind his ears, and over the strands fall on his forehead. “I need a haircut,” Eddie says out loud to the empty room, and it makes him smile so hard his cheeks hurt. 

A haircut! _Him!_  
He’s so excited at the idea that he forgets how weird things are with Richie at the moment, and the second he walks back in the room after dinner Eddie is on him before the door is even closed.  
“Rich!” he exclaims and grabs one hand Richie’s raised up in surprise in his. He sinks it in his own hair, guiding the fingers down until the strands slip through his ringed fingers. “Look! It’s longer, I didn’t even notice until now. I can cut it however I want, it’ll just grow back!”  
Richie’s hand rests at the nape of his neck, squeezing lightly when he starts laughing. Eddie looks up at him and sees him study the length of his hair—and as his dark eyes roam from the crown of Eddie’s head to where his thumb touches the sensitive skin behind his ear, shivers travel down to the base of Eddie’s spine. 

It’s good, for a moment, it’s familiar and intimate and everything Eddie is eternally glad he can feel—then Richie’s gaze falls on his, and the smile slips off his face.  
Richie takes back his hand, and the cold Eddie feels is unwarranted but not surprising. “It’s just a few inches, Eds, don’t get too excited.”  
Ah. Right. This is how things are now.  
Eddie takes a step back, trying his hardest to keep his face relaxed and neutral—funny how he was so glad for how expressive it can be just a few minutes ago. “What, not even a dick joke?” he says, feigning levity.  
Richie snorts. “Ah! You’re right, I’ll get back to you when I think of one.”  
He’s flexing the hand that was in Eddie’s hair open and close, open and close. _What the hell does that mean?_ some delirious, confused part of Eddie thinks, and immediately after, _he didn’t want to touch you_.  
“Don’t keep me waiting too long,” he says, barely aware if it even made sense as a response. 

The rest of the night there’s this stilted, awkward air hovering around them that Richie can’t stand, if the fact that he pretends to fall asleep at 10PM is any indication. 

So? What is Eddie supposed to think, if not the obvious? Richie doesn’t like that he’s becoming more human.  
Why look for increasingly ridiculous explanations when that alone explains so easily the change in their relationship?  
And it’s fine, he tells himself, he can’t blame Richie for feeling the things he feels—God knows Eddie has figured out that emotions have a mind of their own and follow absolutely no logic.   
Eddie will just need to.. _.adapt_ to this new situation and do his best not to make Richie uncomfortable so that their friendship can go back to what it was—and if he has to give up his hopes for something more in the process, then so be it.

It’s not like he doesn’t have other people in his life, anyway. Just because things with Richie are as they are, it doesn’t mean Eddie is suddenly all alone in the world—he’s very much not. There are other five people who care for him just as much as Richie does,and that Eddie cares for right back.

Uh. He should talk about this with one of them, shouldn’t he?

☆☆☆ 

December 5th, 1993

It’s not often Eddie finds himself alone with someone who’s not Richie. 

He’s started to realize only recently how heavily he’s been relying on Richie to just...keep him sane.  
_That’s not what normal people do,_ Eddie tells himself, _you can’t live_ for _someone else._  
No wonder things are so weird between the two of them, now! It might have been tolerable for Richie in those first months where Eddie was still learning how to be alive—when Eddie was still a novelty for him—but it must have gotten old incredibly fast. 

He’s so tired of being tugged in so many directions at the same time by his own stupid, overreacting mind. It’s exhausting. His feelings are human but he still sees himself as fake; he refuses to be treated as a fragile doll, and then he goes and mopes for weeks when the guy he’s in love with starts acting with him like he does with all his other friends. He clings like an immature child, he swears like a fucking sailor, he struggles to understand even himself—let alone other people!—in a way that betrays how little he’s been around.

“It’s such bullshit,” he mumbles to himself, face down on the hammock. “And I fucking miss him, too!”  
God, he does. He misses Richie.  
Eddie’s nothing but grateful for the privacy of the Clubhouse, because despite how terrifying it is to be left alone with his thoughts and his doubts—and how used he is to being glued at the hip with Richie—he knows that these hours spent by himself do him good.  
Eddie wants to know who he is when no one else is around. 

And yet! He misses Richie every second of the day now, even, if not especially, when they’re actually together. Hence why everything is. Such. Bullshit. 

He spends enough time with his face smushed on the rough fabric of the hammock to doze off. 

Eddie won’t remember later that he dreams. He never remembers it when he wakes up. 

He’s lying on the dusty floor of a house. The house is old and should smell like rotten wood and decay, but there’s the pervading smell of popcorn instead. How does Eddie even know what popcorn smells like? Isn’t his nose purely decorative?  
Nevermind that. He can’t move his body, he realizes, and as he waits for a sense of dread to fill him at the news, something gently pushes at his head, and no panic ever comes. Why should he, he has a friend! Someone to help him. How nice.  
His head lolls to the right, and his cheek presses on the cold floor. Eddie has a clear view of a well now, right there in the middle of the room. Why is there a well here? It looks out of place, the dark bricks at the base too heavy for the precarious state of the building.  
_Nothing looks intact enough to survive even a too-stern look_ , he hears, faint echo rolling from the depths of the house. Someone speaking in a bad Irish accent? _A gust of wind could knock this whole place down!_ _  
_ Oh! Again, nevermind that. There’s a turtle coming out of the well. Is that Eddie’s friend? Must be.  
The turtle’s face is wrinkly, and old, and sad. 

_I’m sorry, kid_

the turtle—Turtle says. 

_I didn’t think my brother was paying any attention._

Eddie tries to open his lips to answer and fails miserably. One second, the Turtle is walking slowly on the edge of the well, dragging its shell with him like a heavy burden, and the next, it’s right in front of Eddie’s face. The forced perspective makes it seem terrifyingly big. Eddie can see his reflection in its dark, fathomless eyes. 

_I thought I was doing a good thing. But I’m tired, kid, all I want to do lately is sleep. I should have imagined...oh, well. Too late now. He went back to his old ways of using people as puppets, you know? How dreadful. So you try and be careful, alright, kid?_

Eddie lies motionless where he’s been lying motionless the entire time. 

_Alright. Good talk. Eddie. Eddie? Eddie!_

“Eddie! Are you okay?”

Eddie startles awake, almost falling on his ass in the process. He turns around on the hammock, blinking himself coherent, and the first thing he sees is Beverly smirking down at him.  
“Oh, good, I was about to slap you to see if you went into a coma or something,” she says and walks backwards until she can sit on the comfy chair tucked in the corner.  
“You scared the shit out of me,” Eddie laments, passing a hand through his hair to give it a semblance of order.  
“You, too! As I said, I thought you were in a coma.”  
“Why would I be in a coma?”  
“I don’t know,” Bev says, stretching her legs as long as the narrow space in front of her allows. “My working theory was that Richie told a joke bad enough to knock you unconscious.”

Eddie snorts and sits up straighter on the hammock. “One of these days…,” he says and trails off with an exasperated sigh. “What are you doing here, by the way?”  
“I finally finished writing the essay-from-Hell I was talking about last week, so I’m free for the rest of the day,” she explains. Her hand plays absentmindedly with the frayed edge of her denim skirt. “Why? I can’t come visit my friend?”  
Eddie would blush if he could, embarrassed that his tone came out so inquisitive before. “Of course you can. I enjoy spending time with you, Bev.”  
“Aw, I do, too. You’re never this kind when Richie is around.”  
“I have a reputation to maintain.”  
Beverly laughs, shaking her head. “Yeah, the reputation of a feral raccoon,” she says, and Eddie flips her off, but there’s barely any heart behind it.

They simply chat for a while, and at some point, Eddie makes some space on the hammock for Bev to squeeze herself into—she climbs on gracefully, and Eddie finds himself thinking that the process is much easier that Richie always makes it seem, flinging his long limbs around dramatically until he’s practically laying on top of Eddie.

Well. He doesn’t do that anymore.

Ugh, let’s not go there—Eddie is tired of being a mopey and whiny mess. He likes Beverly, and when he said that he enjoys spending time with her, he wasn’t lying. She’s always so _cool,_ for lack of a better term, taking everything in stride in a way that Eddie, plagued as he is by insecurities and anxieties, finds both fascinating and inspiring.  
If Richie distracts him from said insecurities and anxieties by the means of being an annoying little shit (and forcing Eddie’s entire attention on him, not that Eddie has ever fought that particularly hard), Beverly makes relaxing look effortless.  
“When I’m around her, life seems so easy,” Ben told him once, so lovesick, and Eddie can’t help but agree. 

Speaking of Ben—that’s the one topic that makes her uncharacteristically flustered.  
“So, how are things going with your boyfriend?” Eddie asks.  
Bev, predictably, smiles and goes redder around the cheeks. “Good, they’re going—really good.” She turns to face Eddie in the confined space of the hammock and bites her bottom lip to stifle a giggle. “Actually, we, uh. _You know.”_ _  
_ Eddie frowns. “I know what?”  
“You know what!”  
“ _What?_ ”  
She openly laughs now, and Eddie follows along at the absurdity of the conversation. “We,” she says meaningfully, and then does a gesture with her hands that Eddie recognizes as vaguely indecent, and he finally understands.  
“You had sex!” he exclaims, still laughing.  
Bev waggles her eyebrows and then rolls onto her side so she can hide her face in the crook of Eddie’s neck. Eddie wraps his arm around her shoulder in a side hug and blinks a couple of times at the wooden ceiling of the Clubhouse.

“I have,” he says, a hand raised in front of himself to emphasize every word, “ _so_ many questions. Would it be super inappropriate to ask all of them? I don’t know the etiquette here.”  
Bev shifts her head until it’s laying on his chest and hums thoughtfully. “If any of the other boys asked me about it, I would clock them,” she states, “but I will do an exception for you. Fire away.”  
The first thing he wants to know is the most obvious. “Was it good?”  
“It was awesome. Kind of awkward, but in the best way, if that makes sense, you know? Ben asked me if I was okay approximately one thousand times both during and after—lucky for him I’m in love and didn’t find it annoying.”  
“Good, good,” Eddie nods, thoroughly fascinated by the whole thing. Sex is definitely the human experience that he finds the most intriguing—and _attractive_ —if only because it’s one of the few things he found out about all by himself.

He was reading a romance book when he first heard of it—it was early on, when the Losers were still bringing all sorts of things to the Clubhouse to keep him entertained. He’s fairly sure it’s a novel that one of the boys stole ( _'borrowed without permission_ , as Richie would put it) from their mom’s bookshelf, not bothering to check what it was about. Not Eddie’s favourite genre, he would tell you now, but at the time he chalked it up to the most interesting thing he’s ever set eyes on.  
The sex scenes weren’t particularly descriptive—the details kept purposefully vague by the author, who sprinkled them in between bouts of purple prose—but they sure left Eddie equal part intrigued and confused.  
They talked about things going inside other things, although fuck if Eddie could figure out what _‘shaft of love’_ was supposed to mean, and it supposedly felt...good? Incredible? Earth-shattering?

 _Sign me the fuck up_ , he recalls thinking, even when he barely knew what was going on. 

Months of exposure to pop-culture in various forms taught him another thing or two about sex, and he wouldn’t sign the fuck up for it any less, now that the actual dynamics of it are cleared in his head.  
He is, however, pretty bummed out that his not-quite human body wouldn’t allow for it. 

Still. Eddie won’t let the opportunity to hear about it first-hand slip through his fingers.  
“So, like,” he says, testing his ground, “What did you guys do, specifically…?”  
“Oh,” Bev goes, completely blasé about the whole thing. “First things first, I taught him how to finger me.”  
“ _Beverly!”_ _  
_ “What?” she laughs, “You asked me! You don’t get to say TMI, now.”  
Eddie covers his face with one hand, well aware that he would be blushing if he could. “Yeah, yeah, I just wasn’t expecting that.” He clears his throat, trying to regain composure. “Ben didn’t know how?”  
Bev snorts. “Honey, trust me, these boys may talk about sex all day, but they don’t know shit. Ben applied himself, though! And my _God_ , if he isn’t a _fast learner._ ”  
She lets out a dreamy sigh that makes Eddie huff a laugh and flick her nose. “Focus! Don’t get lost reminiscing, you promised me details.”  
“I did not promise you details, you perv!”  
“I’m not a perv!” Eddie argues, “mine is...scientific curiosity, that’s all.”  
Bev raises up on her elbow and squints down at him, a finger wagging in front on his face. “Sure thing, buster, _‘scientific curiosity.’_ You’re lucky I’m dying to tell someone about this, and you’re the only one I find suitable.”  
“Wow,” Eddie deadpans, “thanks for the honor.”  
“You’re welcome,” she says and drops on her back on Eddie’s side, shimming a little in place to get comfortable. “Anyway. Ben’s mom was out, so we were in his bedroom, right? This happened five days ago, by the way, I don’t think I’ve mentioned that.”  
“Is that why it took you so long to finish the essay? Were you too busy thinking about it and going all moon-eyed?”  
“ _Maybe._ Shut up, now. I’m trying to set the scene: we’re in his bedroom, and there are lit-up _candles_ on the window sill because he’s a _dork_. I tell him, _your curtains are going to catch on fire_ , and he goes all red and says _oh my God you’re right, I’m sorry, I thought they would be romantic_ , so obviously I had to kiss the embarrassed look off his face. We made out for a while—Ben’s a big fan of kissing, which, I mean, no complaints here!—and then things escalated. No, Eddie, don’t look at me with that tone of eyebrow—listen, I’m going to keep some things for myself, okay? So anyway, when we got to the _main act,_ I guess you could say, there was this moment when I got really nervous, almost all of a sudden. I’ve heard horror stories about how much it hurts for girls the first time, and I guess they all came back to me at the same time. But then I looked up at Ben, and he was already staring back at me like I hung the moon or something, and I wasn’t so anxious anymore. I thought, this boy loves me too much to ever hurt me—and I guess I was right, because I’ve never felt as good as the moment he...well, slid into me. There’s no elegant way to say that, uh? And it wasn’t even the physical sensation of it that made me feel like that, at least not at first—it took us a while to figure how to move together, how to make it better—it was just so. So _right_. With anyone else, I don’t think I would have liked it that much. But I’m in love with him, Eddie, and I think it made all the difference.”

They’ve both been staring at the ceiling as Bev talked, her voice warm and full of affection. Eddie let her talk uninterrupted, and when she’s done they both lapse into silence.  
Beverly seems to barely notice. She sighs, and her eyes flutter closed as a smile spreads over her lips. 

So, that’s what love looks like on someone else. 

“That sounds incredible,” Eddie says, meaning it. “I’m so happy for you. And Ben, as well—you both deserve something this good.”  
She knocks her foot against Eddie’s. “Come on, don’t say it like that.”  
“Like what?”  
“I don’t know,” she responds, “Like you’re never going to experience something like that in your life.”  
Eddie didn’t think he gave any sort of inflection to his comment, but apparently the sadness and longing were evident in his voice. “Well, I _won’t_ , will I? If my body could... _allow_ that sort of thing—which it doesn’t, by the way, if you were wondering—who would I do it with? I only want—”

And there, his sentence stops. He doesn’t even trail off, he just snaps his mouth shut so fast his teeth clack together. 

“Only...?” Bev says, encouraging him to continue with a gesture of her hand. 

Eddie hesitates. Should he talk about his feelings for Richie with her? Can he even articulate himself coherently enough for her to understand what the fuck he’s trying to say? The last time he had to express his feelings, he had had ten days to create a speech in his head, and he only managed to say it all out loud because he was stuck in a dark supply closet with Richie, and their position meant he didn’t need to look at him in the face as he did so.  
How is he supposed to do the same now, out in the open and with no time to prepare?

On the other hand, though, he’s already reached the conclusion that he needs to trust his friends to be there for him when he asks for help. This is the perfect moment to finally do it. 

“Okay,” he says, eyes still firmly trained to the ceiling so he doesn’t have to see Bev’s reaction. “Let’s say that someone, hypothetically, has the trembles for someone else.”  
“Someone has the what?”  
“Sorry, a-a crush. How would they, uh—” _Oh God, this is hell._ “How would they even know that for sure? If someone’s never had a crush before because, still hypothetically, they’ve gained sentience only a few months prior...how can they differentiate from that and just, I don’t know, liking the other person as a friend?”  
Bev hums, and when Eddie tilts his head to finally look at her he finds her smirking. “And let’s say, hypothetically, that this other person is also a close friend of theirs? And they’re always bickering like an old married couple?”  
Eddie groans and covers his face with his arm. “Sure, yeah,” he concedes, giving up all pretense that he’s not talking about Richie and himself.  
“Tall, dark hair, owns three different pairs of socks with bananas printed on them?”  
“Richie has _three_ pairs of those monstrosities?”

Bev laughs, nodding emphatically. “He does! He’s a fashion disaster, isn’t he? I would honestly die for him.”  
Eddie smiles as well, starting to relax when faced with Beverly’s complete lack of surprise over his confession. “So?” he asks, trying to get back on track. “How do I figure out if I like him the way you like Ben?”  
“There’s no precise method, Eddie,” she says with a sigh. “Wouldn’t that be useful, uh? But no, I’m sorry, I can’t give you a definitive answer.”  
Eddie is not surprised—disappointed, but not surprised. “Oh.”  
“ _But_ , what I can do is tell you what I feel for Ben, see if any of that rings familiar for you. Remember when we talked about kissing, a while ago?”

Of course he does. That conversation stayed with him longer than he’s willing to admit, images of Richie kissing him senseless flooding his head every time he thought back to it. “I said it sounded like a terrible illness, and Ben responded that it hurts, but in a good way.”  
“Yeah, that goes for being in love as well. I get butterflies in my stomach when I think of Ben; sometimes he’s the _only_ thing I can think about, and if, for whatever reason, I can’t go see him, I miss him so much it’s a physical pain.” She scoffs then, looking embarrassed. “It’s fucking insane if you think about it. I mean, I see him all the time! And yet, half an hour apart can feel like years. Do you ever miss Richie like that?”

Eddie nods and lets his arm fall back on the hammock. His eyes flutter close. “Yeah,” he whispers, feeling all the weight of week after week spent missing Richie even when they’re together. “That’s one point in the ‘I’m In Love With Him’ column, I guess.”  
Bev takes his hand in hers, and squeezes in silent support. “Talking with Ben is effortless. We could on and on for hours and never run out of things to say. He makes me feel smarter, funnier, something worth loving the way he does. Does that make sense?”  
“Oh, God,” Eddie says on a whisper. “Yeah, yeah, it does. I never feel better then when I think of a comeback for some of Richie’s bullshit, and he smiles at me all proud, like I just haven’t insulted his entire family line.”  
Bev snorts. “You two are so weird. What else? Come on, Eddie, your turn now. Tell me about Richie. Describe him to me like I’ve never met him.”

“He’s obnoxious,” Eddie says immediately. “He jokes about everything and anything, especially when it’s least appropriate. He dresses in what a clown would consider business-casual. He wears this stupid pair of glasses that are too big for his face.”  
Another squeeze at his hand. “What else?”  
“He’s got the prettiest eyes, though, behind the lenses.” Eddie can picture them, how dark they look, how deep—his long lashes, the way they brush on Eddie’s skin at night when they’re cuddled close. “And his hair, too. He’s got thick curls that always fall over his face, and he says he’s going to cut them soon, but he never does, so every few seconds he’s pushing them back, but they just bounce right back in place. I give him shit for it, but it suits him. I hope he never cuts it. He—he’s so smart, too. Smarter than he gives himself credit for, which is _infuriating_ because he’s always making jokes about being dumb when I know he is anything but. God, I hate it when he does that. He’s top of his class, for God’s sake!”  
Bev hums and giggles when Eddie groans his frustration. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure he’ll be Valedictorian this year,” she says.  
“Shut up, you said you’re pretending you don’t know him!” Eddie responds, making Bev laugh even louder. He doesn’t stop to ask what a Valedictorian is—she sounded proud as she said it, and that’s good enough for Eddie. “Where was I? He’s smart. He’s smart, and he’s funny, and he makes me laugh, Bev, all the time—and he annoys the shit out of me, which I think is my favourite part. The arguing, the insulting each other, he makes it so _easy_. It’s like...It’s like with him I can speak a language only the two of us can understand. He makes me feel—”  
“Special?” Beverly finishes for him, a smile evident in her voice. 

Eddie lets the hand he was waving around to emphasize his points fall back on his side. “Yeah,” he admits. _That’s why I love it when he calls me Eds, he’s the only one who does._ “What you said.”

“Well,” Beverly sighs, sitting up on the hammock to look down at him. “You and Richie are two weird individuals. Half the things you said about him were insults, but you sounded absolutely lovesick, so I’m gonna focus on that.”  
“What’s the verdict, then?” Eddie asks. “Crush or no crush?”  
Bev tilts her head, a single eyebrow raising up on her forehead as she studies him. “I think you already know the answer, honey. But for what it’s worth, I officially diagnose you with an awful case of being in love with your best friend.”

Whatever is in the place of Eddie’s stomach as of now clenches painfully—he thinks he hears the creaking of gears screeching to a halt. It’s not that he hasn’t thought the words himself often enough in the last few months, possibly ever since he learned what the _symptoms_ of lovesickness are, but hearing them in someone else’s mouth is a different deal altogether.  
_I’m in love with Richie._ Yeah, sounds about right.  
“Oh,” is the only thing he manages to say. 

“Oh indeed,” Bev agrees. She leans back on the higher part of the hammock, her legs stretched in front of her herself.  
Eddie rolls on his side until he can lay his cheek on the rough fabric of her denim skirt, because he doesn’t want to see her face when he asks his next question. “What the hell do I do now?”  
He feels more than hears Bev sigh, and then her hand falls softly over Eddie’s hair, to rake her fingers through it. “Fuck if I know, Eddie,” she says. “It took me months to work up the courage to kiss Ben on Halloween, even though I knew he liked me back—and Richie does, too, you know that right?”  
“Does what?”  
“Like you back, dumbass—trust me when I say it’s _painfully_ obvious.”  
Hope swells in Eddie’s chest, and he promptly shuts down the feeling. “How can you be so sure?” he asks instead, the words coming out awkward because of how his face is pressed on Beverly’s leg. “Richie made it clear that he doesn’t want me too close. I’m not stupid, I’ve noticed how he finds an excuse to get the fuck away from me whenever I cross the line. Problem is, I don’t know where the fucking line is! There didn’t used to be _any_ line!”  
“Eddie—”  
“And I keep forgetting about it, and every time he reminds me it _hurts_. I know I can’t force him to like me the way I like him—  
“ _Eddie—_ ”  
“I can’t fault him for it either, cause I wouldn’t like me if I was in his place, which is why I should back off and accept that things are not going back to normal because there was never any normal. I mean, look at me! What the fuck even _am_ I— _ouch!_ Bev, what the hell?”

Bev retracts her hand from where she slapped his shoulder hard, and Eddie rubs at the sore spot. “Sorry, but you wouldn’t shut up. And I didn’t like the direction that was taking, so—yeah, I’m actually not really sorry.”  
Eddie lays back on what would be his side of the hammock if hammocks had sides and looks up at her. She holds his gaze, and whatever she finds there makes her own soften in something fond and kind of sad. “Eddie,” she says, so serious all of a sudden, “you’re _not_ the problem. Whatever Richie is going through, none of it is your fault.”  
Eddie swallows back the nothing in his mouth. “Then whose is it?”  
“This world is not kind to people like Richie—or you, I guess, however unique your situation might be.”  
“What do you mean people like us?”  
Beverly hesitates a moment, clears her throat. “Boys who like boys. And girls who like girls, too, but that’s not your case. Richie—he’s never _told_ me, really, at least in not so many words, but we’ve been friends for years now and he’s never looked at any girl the way he looks at you. Ben looks at me like that, but Ben doesn’t have to be scared to do it in public, because no one will beat him up for loving a girl.”  
Eddie frowns, an unfamiliar sting burning on the back of his eyes. “But they’d beat Richie up for loving me?”  
“Yeah,” Bev simply says. Eddie’s never seen her so sad.  
“Then I _am_ the problem,” he states, voice breaking at the end. 

Beverly shakes her head, cupping his face in her hands and forcing it up to look at her. “No, no, you’re _not._ You hear me, Eddie? _You_ ’re not the problem, _Richie_ is not the problem, liking boys is not the problem—this stupid backwards town is, and the rest of the world to boot. It doesn’t have the right to drive you two apart.”  
Eddie curls his hands around her wrists, nodding shakily. “Yeah,” he concedes, a wobbly smile on his face. The stinging behind his eyes fades. “Yeah, alright. I believe you. But how do I make it better?”  
“I don’t know if you can,” Bev admits, “make the world better, I mean, at least not right now. But what you can do is be _with_ Richie, as a _fuck you_ to everyone else.”

Eddie breaks in a laugh, the tension leaving his shoulders. “And because I really do like Richie, right?”  
Beverly laughs too. “That, too, yeah.”  
“Any advice on how to get to that point, ‘o wise one?”  
She shrugs, dropping her hands in her lap. “Kiss him.”  
Eddie’s mouth gapes open. “ _What?_ Just like that?”  
“Yeah. It worked out well for me. Tonight, when you’re alone in his room—there’s no way Richie won’t kiss you back. Whenever you’re together he seems two seconds away from sweeping off your feet and running to the first room with a lock he can find.”  
“He does not!”  
“Pfft, whatever makes you sleep at night, lover boy.”

 _Lover boy_. He’d like to be Richie’s lover boy. 

Oh, God. Eddie’s got it _so_ bad for him.

Can he? Kiss Richie, he means, the way he’s been fantasizing about for months—finally find out what it feels like to lick and bite at Richie’s plump lips and have the same been done to him. It sounds too easy, a scenario that Eddie believes would end well only if they were characters in one of those fairy tales about princesses and evil witches and One True Loves.  
But Beverly seems so sure about it, the proposition falling easily out of her mouth the second Eddie asked for it—and wasn’t Eddie thinking not long ago that she has more life experience than the rest of the Losers, for better or for worse? Shouldn’t he trust her advice?

“Do you really think I should?” he asks, just to hear her reassure him once more.  
“Yes,” she says, smiling warmly at him. “I know it’s scary, but it’ll be so worth it, Eddie, I swear.”

Eddie nods. Scary—yes, it’s going to be scary; it’s scary now that Richie is nowhere near him, it’ll be terrifying tonight when they’re in the same room, and Eddie will have to face the coldness Richie’s been reserving for him lately.  
But now he knows what the problem is, and even if he doesn’t understand what could possibly be wrong about two boys liking each other—not that Eddie even _is_ a boy, at least not _yet_ —well. Eddie doesn’t understand a lot of things about this world, he’ll just have to add this to the list.  
He’d like to think that he can be brave, too. Eddie’s spent a long time being afraid he could break at every wrong move, and now that he knows he _won’_ t, he might as well take some risks. 

So yeah. Fuck it. He’s going to do it. 

He narrows his eyes, and looks straight into Beverly’s encouraging eyes. “I’m going to kiss the shit out of Richie,” he says with as much resolve as he can put in his voice. 

The only answer he gets from her is a heartfelt _hell yeah_ and a high five so enthusiastic it makes the skin of their palms sting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you liked the awkward sex talk, and most of all I want to apology for making you read the phrase "shaft of love" with your own two eyes.


	11. Chapter Eleven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Just let me finish. I told you I felt lost without you, and I realized only later that I was practically forcing you to stay close to me, if anything else than to avoid feeling guilty. Which is not fair. I like you, Rich—more than I can put into words. But I don't want to, to coerce you do with me the things I want to do with you."  
> Richie takes in a shuddering breath. "Which things?" he whispers, looking back at Eddie, eyes wide and watery behind the glasses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I used to post every five days? Yeah, me neither.

_December 5th, 1993_

“Eds? You okay there, buddy?”

Ah! After almost a month of hot and cold treatment, Richie picks now to be observant of Eddie’s emotional state?  
“Yeah, all good,” Eddie says, lying through his teeth, eyes so wide he wouldn’t be surprised if they went rolling off his skull.

His resolve to, as he put it, kiss the shit out of Richie lasted only for as long as he had Bev to keep him confident and motivated. It quickly devolved into a game of _What If…?_ played unwittingly by his brain in which every answer to ‘what if I kissed Richie?’ was a different version of the same worst-case scenario.  
That’s not to say that Eddie doesn’t want to do it anymore. If Eddie could _not_ want to kiss Richie, he would have made that executive decision a while ago and spared himself all this angst and turmoil.  
So yes, he will still do it—in the meantime he’s preparing himself for humiliating rejection.

Which is why Richie is now looking at him with such worry on his lovely, stupid face, and eyes round enough to rival Eddie’s own.  
The light of his desk lamp, blocked by the wide line of Richie’s shoulders, haloes a fuzzy circle around his unruly curls, so that he’s merely a dark silhouette from where Eddie is sitting.  
He looks like the Caravaggio painting of a man with a skull and and feather pen Eddie saw in some art book—well, if the man was wearing a graphic tee with _orgasm donor_ printed on it and was agonizing over his Biology homework. 

Eddie is on the bed, and admittedly he’s not doing a good job of acting normal. He’s been staring outside the window in complete silence for a while, psyching himself up, the VHS of Ghostbusters resting in his lap so they could watch it together when Richie is done studying.  
If Richie can bear staying two hours in Eddie’s company without breaking into hives, that is.  
Eddie can either make things incredibly worse or incredibly better by kissing him (“Straight on the mouth, Eddie, promise me!” “You are weirdly invested in this, Bev”), and he has no idea which one is more likely. 

“Alright,” Richie says, his Biology textbook momentarily forgotten as he observes Eddie. “It’s just that you’re very silent, that’s all. I’m used to you doing your best impression of a screaming monkey like, _all_ the time.”  
“Fuck you,” Eddie snaps, flipping Richie off. “Your mom does her best impression of a screaming monkey when I fuck her—”  
“Hey, mom jokes are not funny when they’re about _mine!_ ”  
“—and I didn’t want to bother you while you’re studying. You know, like a _good_ friend would.”  
Richie frowns and spins his chair until he’s fully facing him. “What the hell does that mean?” he asks, offense clear in his voice, and isn’t it _so_ telling that Eddie’s jab—it wasn’t supposed to be a jab, his frustration and hurt just came spilling out the moment Richie gave him some attention—was directed at him? Richie can play dumb all of he wants, but it’s clear that he’s aware of what Eddie is referencing.  
“I don’t know, Rich,” he says, anger boiling inside him, fueled by frustration as much as fear of rejection. “You tell me.”

Richie drops on his desk the pen he’s been incessantly fiddling with, and makes his way over to sit on his bed, mere inches from Eddie.  
“Dude,” he says, “do you need to buy a vowel? Just give me a straight answer, you’re being so cryptic.”  
Richie can be a good actor when he wants, but, to Eddie, the guilt hiding behind simple confusion in his voice is clear as day.  
“And you’re being willfully obtuse,” Eddie argues. He leans into the anger to drown out his insecurities, furrows his brows so low over his eyes that it’s painful. “I’m tired of having to corner you like this just to know what the fuck is going on. It’s impressive how much you talk and how little you actually _say._ ”  
He sees Richie’s hands clench around his sheets, the silver rings shining weakly in the poorly lit room.  
“Oh, wow, kitten’s got claws,” Richie comments, chuckling in a way that sounds remarkably forced.  
“I was never a _kitten_.”  
“Yeah, you’re right. You’ve had pretty sharp claws since day one, though.”  
“Don’t reduce me to a _caricature_ of myself, Richie. You make it sound like I’m so fucking mean to you all the time, which you know is not true. Or did you get tired of all the bickering and arguing?” Eddie puts the VHS down on the bed, using it as an excuse not to look at Richie for what he says next. “I like who I am when I’m with you, the person I’m becoming—I thought you felt the same.” 

The blood drains from Richie’s cheeks, and he flinches back as if Eddie has slapped him. “Why would I—come on, Eds, I don’t _like_ you,” he says, like it’s nothing, like it’s not enough to make Eddie experience the aftermath of a punch to the gut.  
“Okay,” Eddie responds. They’re still sitting next to each other on the cool comforter of Richie’s bed, which by now is Eddie’s bed as well, even if he’s been feeling more and more like an unwanted guest, the striped pattern distorted where Richie is holding on for dear life—his fingers sink in the fabric, his knuckles white, the lovely lines of tendons and bones under his pale skin, and Eddie thinks, _if I had a heart it’d be beating out of my chest_.  
“Okay,” Richie echoes. He nods once, twice, makes a move to stand up.  
“So you won’t like this,” Eddie gets out all in a rush, his hand shooting out to grasp Richie’s shirt, and then he raises on his knees and kisses him. On the mouth, as he promised Bev. 

Turns out that Eddie knows nothing about kissing, which is a problem he should have considered beforehand. Luckily for him, Richie’s lips are soft enough to make Eddie forget he has no idea what he’s doing.  
Richie’s not moving, neither to reciprocate the kiss nor to push Eddie away, so Eddie tests his luck and presses closer, his nose bumping on the thick frame of Richie’s glasses when he tilts his head in an attempt to deepen the kiss. His free hand goes, irresistibly, to cup the sharp angle of Richie’s jawline that Eddie’s been admiring for as long as he’s had functioning eyes—which is when Richie finally, _finally_ moves. 

In the wrong direction. He stumbles back with a sharp gasp, his fingers pressing over his lips where Eddie’s were mere seconds ago. There’s, if possible, even less blood coloring his face. “What the fuck did you do that for?” he chokes out, voice muffled, and Eddie would cry if he could.  
He sinks back on his knees, humiliation making his limbs limp and useless. “I thought—”  
“That that would be funny?” Richie finishes for him, not at all what Eddie had in mind, but Richie leaves no space for correction. “That’s a low fucking blow, man! Jesus Christ, just because we were arguing doesn’t mean—do you even know what that _meant_? Or did you just want to try out something new?”  
Eddie feels, for the first time ever, his face heat up to a mortifying red blush, in what he’s sure is an almost comical contrast to Richie’s ghostly pale face. “I’m sorry,” he says, scrambling for something better to explain himself. _Is_ there something better, though? “I did it because Bev told me you’d like it.”

Fuck. That’s the worst thing he could have possibly said. Richie seems to agree.

“ _Bev?_ ” he repeats, voice dropping to a low whisper, barely more than mouthing the name. “What, you guys placing bets or something? Hey Eddie,—” he stutters, falling now in an uncanny imitation of Beverly’s self-assured cadence, “hey Eddie, I bet you five dollars Richie will cry if you plant one on him. Poor fag’s never been kissed before, come on, throw him a bone.”  
Eddie can’t believe what he’s hearing—he can’t fathom how Richie could think that’s how his friends talk about him behind his back. Bev, especially! Beverly Marsh, who hugs him hello and goodbye and braids his hair when she notices it keeps falling over his eyes. And Eddie, Jesus, Eddie who’s immediate thought upon waking up for the first time and seeing Richie asleep next to him was _this boy is quite pretty;_ who’s been thinking _and_ _he might be my favorite person_ ever since.   
“Rich, that’s not—” he tries to say, but Richie talks over him, unrelenting.

"Do you even know what that means? Fag? I've never told you 'cause, frankly, I didn't want to hear the word come out of your mouth."  
"I can guess, Bev told me—"  
"Wow, you two sure had long conversations I didn't know about, uh? Did she also tell you you really shouldn't want to be one, Eddie? She should have mentioned that."  
"Richie, I don't care about all that, and I don't understand why _you_ do."

Richie laughs, incredulous, but it's bitter and devoid of humour, and it makes Eddie flinch when he hears it. "You don't understand?" he repeats. "Yeah, you don't fucking _understand_! You've been around for what, like six months? Less, even."

Eddie feels his face flush in anger, heat spreading down his neck, and he can't even stop to marvel at the new sensation because he's just that mad and confused about what's happening. Of all the bad scenarios he came up with...how could he have predicted Richie would react like _this_? "I don't understand," Eddie bites out, "because you've never _told_ me."  
Richie scoffs. "It's not a pleasant topic for me, Eddie. And who appointed me as your life coach, uh?"  
"You did!"  
"Yeah, well, it was fun at first!"

Ah. As in, it's not fun anymore; as in, I'm getting kind of sick of being your babysitter, Eds. There's some twisted satisfaction in Eddie’s anxieties proving themselves right. 

Richie must realize he revealed more than he intended, because he once again blanches and goes silent, his mouth hanging open for a few seconds like he's waiting for the right words to simply come out before he snaps it close. 

"You know, when we talked," Eddie starts, a blanket of calm settling over him, heavy and too hot, "At your school, I mean, before Bowers attacked you—when we talked, I think I put a lot of pressure on you, Richie."  
"No, Eddie, come on—"  
"Just let me finish. I told you I felt lost without you, and I realized only later that I was practically forcing you to stay close to me, if anything else than to avoid feeling guilty. Which is not fair. I like you, Rich—more than I can put into words. But I don't want to, to _coerce_ you do with me the things I want to do with you."  
Richie takes in a shuddering breath. "Which things?" he whispers, looking back at Eddie, eyes wide and watery behind the glasses.  
"Kiss you, for one." Eddie rubs at his lips, chasing away the lingering feeling of Richie's on his own. "Other things. That I can't do anyway, like, _physically,_ so it's not like it matters."  
"No, no, I," Richie says, shaking his head like it pains him. "If I somehow, uh, convinced to want those things—I don't know—I'm so sorry, Eds."  
"What are you talking about? _Convinced_ me?"  
"Yeah, like if I made you think that's, that's normal, I didn't mean to, I'm sorry."

"Richie, I'm not following." Eddie steps closer, and Richie shuffles back until he bumps into his desk. Eddie doesn't want to corner him, so he doesn’t follow him further. "You didn't make me do anything. I wanted to kiss you, I still do. If you don't want me back, that's. Fine. It's fine, you just have to tell me."  
"Eds. Eds you don't _want_ me, alright? That's not okay, you shouldn't say that."  
"That's too fucking bad, Richie. I'm going to say it anyway."  
"You don't know, alright? You don't know shit about this stuff! You have zero life experience, and you think you can go around telling boys you like them? I just—I was too touchy-feely with you or whatever, and you got confused.”  
"I’m not confused, dumbass, they’re just my feelings! Why should _you_ get to decide?"  
"Because they’re not _real!_ "

It would have hurt less if Richie had slapped him.  
Eddie’s vision goes blurry as his eyes fill, impossibly, with tears—they don’t spill over, not yet, Eddie too stubborn to cry _now_ for the first time. He’s not sad, why the fuck would he cry? He’s angry. God, he’s never felt this _angry_ , the feeling of fire hot in his throat, in his face, in his voice when he spits out the words he thinks will hurt Richie the most. 

“I didn’t ask to be alive, but I’m here anyway. And to be honest, I don’t know for how much longer, with a fucking _cosmic entity_ that wants me dead. And you think I, I _stole_ these feelings from you somehow? You think I wouldn’t get rid of them if I could? Loving you is _miserable_ work, Richie—so thank you for the eye-opening revelation: if it’s fake, then I can stop. I’ll use what time I have left doing something better.” 

Richie gapes at him. His hands are shaking where he grips the edge of the desk behind him. “You love me?” he whispers.  
_Every day more._ “Not for real, apparently.”  
" _Eds_ —"  
"I think I'm leaving," Eddie interjects. He moves towards the door and spares a glance to the clock on Richie's nightstand: 12:53 AM. His parents are usually asleep by now, if Eddie is careful enough he can leave the house by the backdoor without being seen.  
"What? No, no, wait." Richie moves to follow him but stops dead in his tracks when Eddie glares at him, tears still threatening to spill over.  
"I don't want to sleep here with you,” he says, “God forbid you _convince_ me to cuddle with you during the night or some shit." 

Eddie wrenches the door of Richie’s room open, and he strides through the hallway and down the stairs without daring to look behind him. He doesn’t want to find out what would feel worse: to see Richie running to catch up to him, or not see him at all.

The house is dark and silent, and Eddie easily slips out of the backdoor, closing it behind himself with a barely audible click.  
He immediately regrets not putting on a jacket, or something heavier than the meagre sweater he has one, but he’ll be damned if he goes back to Richie’s room with his tail between his legs asking if he can borrow one of his hoodies. If he freezes to death, then so be it.  
He considers very briefly going to Ben’s house—Eddie still remembers how to get there from that day in July when he came to life—but decides against it. He doesn’t want to see Ben’s worried, puppy-dog eyes right now, nor does he want to risk being caught by his mom as he tries to sneak in. 

The Clubhouse it is, then. 

Eddies ignores the tears clouding his vision, wiping away angrily at the ones that spill down his cheeks, and decides that if this is what crying feels like then he already misses the days when he physically couldn’t do it. Of all the ways his body could have become more human, _this_ is what it chooses to develop?

His walk towards the Barrens is filled with sniffles and the furious pounding of his feet on the asphalt of deserted Derry streets. A man, busy smoking a cigarette outside of a bar, sees Eddie pass by and frowns as if he’s about to ask him something—but Eddie glares at him, truly puts all his heart-broken anger in it, and it’s enough to discourage the guy from approaching. It’s, thankfully, the only time Eddie encounters someone before he reaches Kansas Street. 

Eddie goes through the familiar motions of squeezing himself through the wire fence that someone cut open who knows when and enters the Barrens.  
He’d be scared of how dark it is under the cloak of the trees if he wasn’t so fucking pissed and hurt that he has no space left for anything else. 

He stumbles on the exposed root of a tree and swears under his breath when he almost falls face-first on the path wet and slick with rotted leaves. It snowed a few days ago, and by now, the coat of pure white is reduced to a dirty, half-melted mush. 

The only light, filtering through the skinny branches of the trees, comes from the full moon shining above—almost too big for the night sky, unnerving in its closeness, like the eye of a giant spying down on Derry. 

Eddie doesn't pay it any mind. His eyes are set downwards to the pathway the Losers themselves have created through the years in their back and forth to the Clubhouse. 

Richie's words ring in his ears, and the further away he walks, the more he wishes he'd stayed in his cozy, familiar room. Despite his best efforts, his anger is starting to fade out, and he dreads the moment all he’ll be left with is sadness.  
He could be laying next to Richie now. He could have rolled over after Richie fell asleep and draped himself on his back and told him in a hushed whisper that they could forget their stupid, useless argument and go back to how things were. To the warm days of August when Eddie pretended to like Richie's taste in music so they had an excuse to stay pressed side to side as they shared his earphones. 

It's not that easy, Eddie knows. Part of him is glad he's far away from Richie now—would like not to see his face again anytime soon, actually. Does Richie even realize he tapped with both hands into Eddie's fears and threw them back in his face? 

Eddie's feelings are not real, he said, hence _Eddie_ is not real—and there you go, the obvious answer to a question Eddie’s been asking himself since day one, coming directly from the person Eddie has foolishly put on such a high pedestal.  
And the worst part is, Eddie _knows_ that Richie is just a boy who absolutely does _not_ have his shit together, because Richie said so himself. It makes no sense blaming him for acting like a boy who doesn’t have his shit together, which only makes Eddie angrier because _how the fuck_? How the fuck did he convince himself that a simple kiss would solve all their problems

He’s finally reached the Clubhouse, and he wastes no time to wrench the entrance open and lower himself down the ladder.  
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he repeats to himself under his breath, voice wrecked by sobs. _God_ , why can’t he stop _crying_? “And _fuck you,_ Bev, you made it sounds so fucking easy!”  
Eddie sinks on his favorite chair, tucking his knees up to find comfort in his own closeness, and stares angrily at the panel of wood that makes up the wall. 

Well, what the fuck now? He’s too wired up to go to sleep, it’s too cold outside to go yell at the trees or do something similarly unproductive. 

His eyes fall on the table in front of him, and the stack of papers—organized by color—that he keeps on it beside the three jars full of pens and paint brushes.  
He _could_ write something, even find a way to burn it after if he thinks it would be therapeutic.  
After all, Eddie was made to sit down and put words on a page—although Dr. Kaspbrak probably never intended for him to do it of his own volition, let alone for Eddie to write an angry love letter to the guy who broke his heart. Or the bunch of gears he has in the general area of his chest, at least.

Well, if Dr. Kaspbrak wanted to keep an eye on what his favourite creations is doing, he shouldn’t have died almost fifty years ago. Tough fucking luck.  
Eddie grabs the first sheet of paper on the pile, plus a random pen, and starts writing to Richie with the full intention of never showing him the letter. 

_Richie,_ he inks (Eddie accidentally picked the most expensive pen he owns, a stylographic one that would be considered worthless by any collector but that he loves dearly anyway), and he doesn’t stop for a long while. 

At first, every word that comes out is bitter and sad and full of vitriol—he doesn’t believe in half the things he puts down, but they give him a sick feeling of satisfaction anyway. Maybe his tears will dry out if he’s mean enough.  
Eventually he gets too tired even for that. Anger bleeds out completely, as he feared, and Eddie’s left plainly sad. The last lines, before he hears the sound of whistling and gets distracted, are devastatingly tender, and smeared with the tears falling over the page. 

It’s not the wind, because the wind doesn’t follow the rhythm of Ella Fitzgerald’s _Isn’t it romantic?_ when it blows through the branches of the trees, so Eddie figures there must be someone out there.  
He puts the pen down as gingerly as he can, and thanks whatever entity is watching over him that he stopped loudly sobbing a while ago, and he’s now reduced to silent tears streaming down his face. He hides the letter under the stack of paper for good measure, not caring much if the fresh ink gets smudged, and strains his ears.  
The whistling keeps going, interrupted only by a loud giggle once in a while. It goes on for long enough that Eddie starts believing it’s just some drunk guy who got lost in the Barrens on his way home—wishful thinking, he’s aware—but the illusion is shattered when whoever is out there calls out Eddie by name. 

“Eds, Eddie-boy!” the voice says, and Eddie recognizes with downing horror as Henry Bowers’. “Eddie-bear! Come out, come to play!”

Eddie does not want to come out and play. His legs move all the same: he sees them stand up, and go up the ladder, and step out onto the dark where the temperature dropped even lower in the time Eddie spent underground. He feels like every ounce the mechanical puppet he still deep down is. 

The force controlling his limbs drops like a lead weight, and it’s all Eddie can do not to fall down as well.  
All he can see in front of him is a silhouette stark against the full circle of the moon. “Henry Bowers?” Eddie asks, tired eyes straining to see the boy’s face in the dark. He still holds onto the hope that it’s just Henry and nothing (no one) more.  
“Sort of,” the other answers with a snicker. He steps into a patch of moonlight and Eddie catches the glint of something metallic in his hand—a wrench, maybe, if he had to guess—and the flash of yellowed teeth grinning back at him.

The guy who almost choked Richie to death. The _thing_ that almost choked Richie.  
Oh, if Eddie was angry before, in the misguided sort of way that comes from being hurt by someone you love and hurting them right back, he’s _livid_ now. He will tear whatever is in Bowers 

_back to the habit of using people as puppets_

to fucking shreds for what It did to Richie—and yes, what It intends to do to Eddie. For the first time since forever, Eddie can’t be bothered to worry about his own health. Structural integrity. Whichever term suits him the most now. 

“What are you doing here?” Eddie asks instead of clawing Its eyes out on the spot, or something just as satisfying.  
It grins again with Bowers’ slack mouth, and threateningly swings the wrench back and forth. “Teaching a lesson,” It simply says.  
“To me?”  
It giggles, and makes Bowers step forward until Eddie can see, under the cold light of the moon, the yellow bleeding through his irises. Eddie clenches his fists at his sides, filling his chest with the harsh December air—he can breathe now! Since _when?_ —and stubbornly ignores the fear ramping up inside him the longer he stares in Its unforgiving eyes. “Oh, poor kiddo,” It coos, faking sobs as he shakes Its head, “you think this has anything to do with you! Poor, poor kiddo.”

The wrench swings, back and forth, back and forth.  
Eddie has many questions, none of them kind, none of them compelling enough to fight its way up his throat through the thick layer of _terror._ The closer It gets, the longer It speaks, the more Eddie forgets everything that is not the dread It exudes—they all bleed away, the feelings and memories and promises and _Richie_.

“This lesson,” It growls, as Eddie forgets how to control his own body and falls in a heap on the ground, “is for my brother.”  
Eddie looks up, and his eyelids are stuck open, but he finds that staring unblinking at Its smirking face brings no pain—he stops worrying about _that_ in favor of how he’s hemorrhaging out of himself.  
“He wanted us to sleep, and I was tired so I complied. _You’ve fed for long enough_ , he said, and I told him that I could eat his precious universe whole and it still wouldn’t be _enough_ —but I complied.”

Its voice is alien and hollow and hungry. Eddie would yell but he doesn’t remember how, couldn’t if he tried anyway. Bowers’ arm raises up and up, wrench gripped tight in Its fist. 

“And then he goes and wakes _me_ up? To put some junk back together? So he could make you, you puny little insect? You rotten puppet? How could he ever think I wouldn’t break his toys?”

Eddie sees the metal glint in its arch downwards, and the fading tail of a shooting star somewhere on the black canvas of the sky—and then nothing more. 

☆☆☆

Richie turns around in his bed for what feels like the thousandth time. 

_I'm so fucking stupid_ , he keeps thinking instead of passing out on his empty, cold mattress, and _how did I let it get that bad?_ _  
_ Frankly, it's hilarious he even _tried_ to fall asleep after what happened. 

He let Eddie leave because Richie was hurt, and on the verge of tears, and for the first time since ever he didn't want to be near him. Didn't want to have his soulful eyes on him, boring into him, so _knowing_. 

_Loving you is miserable work._

Shit, he’s going to cry again. He turns again to look at the clock on his nightstand: 02:13 AM it reads, the numbers flashing red. “Still only 2AM?” he whispers to himself, unbelieving.  
Yeah, no, no way he can stay here a second longer. Where the fuck did Eddie even go in the middle of the night, in December? It snowed like two days ago, for fuck’s sake!

Oh God, he’s going to die of hypothermia and it’s all Richie’s fault. 

He quickly slips out of his bed, wiping his eyes until the veil of blurriness fades away. Glasses, shoes, flashlight, jacket, another jacket for Eddie who stormed out with only a sweater on, _what the fuck—_ except that Richie gets distracted by his untied shoelaces and forgets to take it.  
He unknowingly follows the same path Eddie went down on not long ago, including the street with the bar still open for the few men who refuse to go home.  
The same guy who got received a blazing look from Eddie, now drunker and on his fourth cigarette of the night, asks himself what the hell are all these teenagers doing taking a stroll in the dead of night—a thought that he doesn’t make said teenager privy to, not that Richie would have cared that much either way.

Before he realizes it he’s deep in the Barrens, so distracted by the cold and his worry for Eddie that he doesn’t have the time to be frightened by the awful, heavy cloak of wrongness weighing down the trees. 

_Something bad happened, something bad happened, something bad happened—_

But that’s just Richie’s anxiety speaking. 

Something crunches under his foot. 

He bends down to pick it up, the weak cone of light of his flashlight pointed to the ground until Richie catches the glint of something metallic. He takes it in his hand: a gear, almost the size of his palm. Is it from the time Richie and the Losers were fixing up Eddie? Couldn't be, they didn’t do any work in the Clubhouse. Then again, not many people come to the Barrens to do something that involves gears. 

Weird. He pockets it, and keeps walking.

As he gets closer to the Clubhouse, where he hopes to find Eddie awake and willing to accept Richie's apology, he starts noticing other broken parts strewn across the half frozen carpet of leaves. 

Other gears, both smaller and bigger than the one in his pocket, shining when the light of his flashlight sweeps over them. Smooth, thin panels of wood. Shards of porcelain, like someone smashed a large vase not far from there and pieces went flying everywhere. _Did Eddie break something?_ Richie thinks as he tries to avoid stepping on the larger pieces, up on the tiptoes of his boots. 

He ignores the anxiety pooling in his chest, making it hard to breathe. Everything is fine! Eddie probably threw some things around because he was still mad! It’s _fine_ , Richie would go as far as to say that it’s a healthy way of expressing your anger—nevermind that there’s nothing made of porcelain in the Clubhouse that he could have broke, especially not in that particular shade of pale pink that Bev mixes just for Eddie; nevermind that Eddie’s all bark and no bite, could argue and yell for hours but never raised a finger against anything or anyone…

“Eddie?” he tries calling out, his teeth chattering from the cold.  
He’s close to the Clubhouse now. There’s what looks like a shoe near Richie’s own feet. He doesn't look. What did they even argue about, again? He just hopes Eddie’s okay. Why wouldn’t he be? Of course is he! He’s on his cute little hammock sleeping, and he’ll yell at Richie some more about being woken up, and as it is Richie will be happy to have Eddie look at him with that cold, cruel disappointment in his eyes, if it means _here_ and _safe_. 

Richie’s hands shake as he swings his leg over a line of tall bushes to get to the Clubhouse, as he’s been doing since the day Ben proposed to build some space just for themselves here in the Barrens.  
He doesn’t notice it at first, busy as he is trying not to throw up, but there’s static electricity in the air that makes his skin tingle—something happened here, something that Richie doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe as anything but _bad._

Stubbornly, he closes his eyes, turns his flashlight off. He doesn’t want to see what awaits him in the clear patch of grass where the Losers have built their home.

For a few long minutes, Richie stays still, practically mid-step, his teeth chattering and toes freezing and hot blood pumping desperately from his heart—he’s read somewhere that hearts have only so many beats programmed to last an entire life. Maybe his will run out before he has to face...whatever it is he has to face.  
Richie’s heart gives no sign of stopping its incessant drumming, and so—prompted by a cold dust of wind, more than anything—he opens his eyes and turns the flashlight back on.

He looks. It takes no longer than his brain processing what he’s seeing for Richie to burst into tears.

“Eddie,” he sobs, “Eddie, _Eddie_ —”

Is it even—there’s just— _oh God._ Richie’s eyes fall on Eddie’s head, his locks of hair sprawled on the ground, the neck _detached from the rest of his body,_ and he falls on his knees and throws up.  
He’s still crying when he gets back up on his feet, and he wishes fervently his flashlight’s batteries would die so he didn’t have to _see_ this. 

There’s no blood, because Eddie didn’t have any blood; there’s no gruesome show of entrails half buried in the dead, frozen leaves but Richie keeps thinking _that’s his corpse that’s his corpse that’s his corpse_ as he cries so hard he can’t breathe.  
What happened is obvious, and not at all important right now, not when what’s left of Eddie is laying in pieces like a puzzle someone got bored of and abandoned. Richie stumbles closer to where Eddie’s head is— _God why he’s dead he’s gone Eddie_ —and he’s wrecked by sobs again when he sees that half his face is shattered in the inside of his skull, one eye staring back at Richie from the ground while the other is still cradled in the lovely shape of Eddie’s lid, long lashes shielding it.  
Richie lets the flashlight fall from his slack grip. He kicks it away when the light paints what’s left of Eddie’s face in too sharp a contrast for Richie to bear right now, and it’s in near darkness that he sinks his fingers in Eddie’s hair, and gently pushes it until it’s connected to Eddie’s torso again. 

He’s broken beyond repair.  
Eddie’s chest looks misshapen under the sweater he’s still wearing—it caves where it shouldn’t cave, metal rattles at Richie’s attempt to put everything back together.  
Eddie’s arms, his legs, one knee, his right hand, two long fingers that Richie almost steps on and finishes breaking—that makes his cry the hardest, the thought of hurting Eddie even worse when there’s barely anything left—his eye, _fuck it’s covered in dirt how can Eddie see if it’s covered in dirt_ , a curved piece of porcelain that Richie can’t even begin to guess where is supposed to go; Richie picks them all up and puts them back in a place, in a haze that he won’t remember in the morning, his Voices keeping him company as he goes through the task. One after one, he loses himself in them, pretends not to be himself for as long as his frayed mind will allow. 

There will be nights, years from now, when he'll relive the scene in his sleep. Eddie's skin cold and wet under his fingers, and no more skin-like to the touch that the dolls his grandma has high up on a shelf in her guest bedroom. The injustice of not being able to lay his head on Eddie's chest and sob in the fabric of his sweater, to grieve like he should—because there's not even a corpse, there's not a body, only the bite of metal and the fear of breaking what's left intact.

"Eddie," Richie sobs again when the job is done, not realizing he hasn't stopped saying his name the entire time. "It's okay, I'll fix you, I'll fix you and you'll come back to me."

He bends down until he can kiss Eddie's forehead, and tries and fails not to think about how Eddie’s lips felt on his—warm, and so _soft_ , God, Richie's never felt anything so lovely touch part of himself before.

The porcelain is smooth, and the layer of paint dries his mouth. Richie covers with one shaking hand the part of Eddie's face that's not there anymore. "You'll come back to me, it'll be fine," he repeats in a whisper, still crying harder than he ever has in his life. "I'm so sorry, Eds, I'm so sorry."

He won’t remember the hours to come. Richie goes through the motions like a man lost in a dream, so let this part be told from the perspective of fathomless, tired eyes observing from far away: 

There's a boy kneeling on the ground. His shoes are soaked through with melted snow, mud stains the worn fabric of his favorite pair of jeans, which will soon be thrown away together with everything that reminds the boy of this night—and this Maturin knows because Maturin knows everything, and because in his old age he developed a soft spot for boys who long as fiercely as Richie does.  
There's the shell of a friend in front of the boy—an empty, colorless canvas that Maturin took great care in putting back together at the best of his capabilities (so sad to think that this is what passes as his best nowadays; after all, he's the one who threw up the Universe).

After a time so small for a god that it doesn't deserve nomenclature—but what is hours for the rest of the world, the night was dark and unforgiving when Richie got here, look now how the sun rises behind the greyscale horizon of the Barrens—the boy takes his friend in his arms (one, two, three pieces at a time. Richie will have to do the worst trip of his life five times before he's done) and brings him underground. He sets his friend down on the dingy mattress where the friend has rested his head many times before, and then lays down himself. 

He hasn't stopped crying. Since the first time Maturin caught sight, almost by mistake, of a human crying in misery, he's felt nothing but confusion: what was the purpose of feeling such heartbreak when their problems are so small, so ephemeral? They'll be gone in the blink of an eye anyway. Now he sees Richie sob, and shake his head, cover his eyes as if that'll be enough to erase reality, and Maturin finally gets it. After all, he liked Eddie, too. 

Ah, what a shame, what a waste, what a miserable sight. 

Maturin watches until Richie succumbs to sleep, his head nestled near Eddie's, wet and cold to the bone, and then leaves him to the privacy of his tragedy. 

Who knows, perhaps the boy will find a way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Insult me in the comments <3


	12. Chapter Twelve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary of the last chapter cause I haven't uploaded in like two months:
> 
> Eddie tried to kiss Richie, and Richie freaked out because of his internalized homophobia and his fear of taking advantage of Eddie.  
> They argued, and Eddie left to go spend the night in the Clubhouse--sad and angry, he wrote a his feelings down to vent, but he was interrupted by someone calling his name. Pennywise, possessing Bowers, lured Eddie out and reverted the magic that was making Eddie more and more human. Richie found him later destroyed, and brought all the pieces safely in the Clubhouse and, exhausted, feel asleep there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have nothing to say for myself. Enjoy.

_December 6th, 1993_

“Richie, oh fuck. Richie, what— _what happened?_ ” 

Richie recognizes, although a pounding headache makes the process slow, that it’s Stan’s voice he heard, and it’s Stan’s hand clasped around his shoulder.  
He opens his eyes with a slow blink. “‘The fuck, Staniel?” he mumbles, voice scratching at his throat. God, why does he feel like he was run over by a car?

Stan doesn’t answer, just tugs him up with two hands around Richie’s biceps, and crashes him into a hug. Richie, who’s never refused a hug in his life—especially if it comes from Stan, who doles out only few and far between—goes willingly. He tightens his arms around Stan’s middle, noticing only now that his friend is shaking like a leaf, and peers worryingly over his shoulder to get his bearings: why the hell are they in the _Clubhouse?_ The last thing Richie remembers is—

Oh. Oh, fuck. 

“Richie, fuck, are you okay?” Stan is saying, sounding frantic. “Shit, _shit_ , I can’t even look at him—just keep your eyes closed, Richie, okay? Please keep your eyes closed.”  
Richie sinks deeper in the hug, tucking his face in the hollow of Stan’s neck. Memories come flooding through with no reprieve, and he wants to tell Stan that shutting his eyes won’t stop the images of Eddie’s mangled body from rushing in, but what comes out is a sound that’s more a scream than a sob.

“I forgot, for a second _I forgot_ ,” he cries into Stan’s neck, and he feels him push his face into Richie’s curls and mouth _I’m sorry_. “I came here—last night, we argued, and then I came here and I found Eddie—Stan, please, what do I do now?”  
Stan sucks in a breath and clears his throat, like he used to when as a kid he played outside with Richie and Bill, and scraped his knees as often as them, but always refused to let a tear slip. Two hands cradle Richie’s face, and then Stan is leaning back to look at him in the eye. He’s so pale his skin has taken on a sickly green tint, but his mouth is set in a determined line. “We’ll fix him. We did once, we’ll do it again—no, don’t fucking look at him Richie, eyes on me.” Richie complies, ceasing his attempts to turn his head; he’s never heard Stan swear this much before. “I need to bring you home first, okay? Your parents are worried sick, they woke up and couldn’t find you anywhere.”  
Hot tears spill out when Richie shuts his eyes closed in refusal, and Stan wipes them away with his thumbs. “I-I’m not fucking _leaving_ him, no,” he argues, pushing away from Stan’s touch to lay back down near Eddie.

He has only the time to look back at Eddie’s ruined profile and think _he’d hate being this dirty_ —because there’s dirt everywhere on the porcelain of his face, few bright spots of pink that Richie suspect being washed clean by his own tears—before Stan is hauling him back to his feet. 

Richie tries to shake him off, unwilling to leave Eddie behind when he looks so sad, so fragile, but Stan’s grip is unyielding. On a good day Richie could hold his own against Stan, who’s firmer on his feet but shorter in stature, but today is not a good day.  
Today, Richie woke up with limbs rigid from the cold and his best friend dead in pieces next to him, so no matter that he screams and cries, no matter that he reels back and tries to punch Stan square in the face, in the end, it makes no difference. 

When he wakes up next, he’s in Stan’s bed. Richie recognizes it immediately because he’s the only person with a bunk bed who voluntarily sleeps in the lower one.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep. With some difficulty he recalls being tugged along through the Barrens kicking and screaming, and then being pushed in the passenger seat of Mike’s truck, Mike at the wheel and Stan squeezed on the other side of Richie.  
Mike looked as alarmed as the sight of a sobbing Richie required, but he started driving back to Stan’s house without waiting for an explanation. Richie guesses he got them anyway at some point, because next time Richie looked at him there were solemn tears streaming down his face as well— _good_ , he remembers thinking, bitter, desperate, because on one hand, he was furious that they made him leave Eddie behind, and on the other, he didn’t want to be miserable alone. He didn’t want to be the only one who loved Eddie enough to cry like the world just ended. 

The memory loses its sharp edges after, gets fuzzy and confused. When did they get to Stan’s house? Did Richie walk up the stairs himself, or did Mike have to haul him up his shoulder like he once did years ago in the quarry, a fourteen-year-old Richie laughing in delight before being dunked under the water? 

Whatever the sequence of events was, it apparently ended with Richie passed out in Stan’s bed.  
He shifts his legs under the pile of blankets thrown over him, and notices that he’s just in his boxers—he’s briefly confused, and then he remembers that his clothes were dirty and half frozen, so it’s a good thing that they’re nowhere in sight. 

The door of Stan’s room silently opens. Without his glasses, all that Richie can recognize is a mop of curly, light brown hair moving closer—there’s the _clink_ of something ceramic touching wood 

_(you were holding Eddie’s torso in your arms and his shoulder hit the wall of the Clubhouse cause you’re a fucking idiot you can’t do anything you hurt him more don’t think don’t think don’t think)_

and a few moments later glasses are lowered over Richie’s nose.  
Stan’s face regains its usual level of detail, although it’s hardly ever been so starkly pale in some places and so dark in others. _Red, purple, white_ , Richie thinks nonsensically: red in Stan’s eyes, purple all around them, white for the rest. _A palette for misery._ _  
_ _“_ My mom made you soup,” it’s the first thing Stan says.  
Richie hums. “It’s my fault.”  
Stan doesn’t bother pretending Richie’s talking about the soup. “Did you chase him into the Barrens and take a hammer to his head? No? Then it’s not your fault.”  
Richie squeezes his eyes shut against the mental image. He begins crying again, and then he feels Stan’s thumbs, still warm from holding the bowl of hot soup, wipe away at his cheeks with a perfunctory touch. “I’m sorry, that was too graphic,” he says. “Still not your fault, Richie.”

Richie regrets letting those words come out in the first place. “Did you call my parents?” he asks instead, hoping that Stan will be magnanimous enough to let the topic drop.  
“Yeah, I did. I told them you came here early this morning.”  
“Did they believe you?”  
Stan nods. “I said you were sad ‘cause your girlfriend dumped you.”  
Richie is startled into laughing. “Fucking hell, Staniel,” he manages to say as his giggles quickly turn into more chest-wreaking sobs, “that is so—that is so _dark—_ adding, fucking, adding injury to insult, I can’t believe you—”  
Stan’s lips curve into a smile that is full of so much quiet sorrow, like he doesn’t want to pile his own feelings on top of Richie’s, that it makes Richie realize something: somewhere along the way, Stan and Eddie became friends. “It was as close to the truth as I dared,” he says softly. 

A pang of fear goes through Richie. “Stan, I—”  
“Stop right there.” Stan holds a hand in front of Richie’s face, and for once he snaps his mouth shut and obeys. “If you think for a second I care that you’re gay, or that—I don’t know, that you like Eddie specifically, then we must not know each other that well. Nice to meet you, my name is Stanley Uris, and I caught Mike and Bill making out in the boys’ bathroom two weeks ago, and I didn’t bat an eye.”  
Richie covers his face with both hands, breaths still fast and shallow as he tries to let the surge of panic fade. “Jesus Christ—”  
“You won’t find him in this household.”  
“Stop, stop making me laugh! It’s confusing, because I’m fucking _miserable_ at the same time, you know I’m not good at processing emotions.”  
“It’s not my fault I’m funnier than you without trying. Richie.”  
“Mh?”  
“Richie, look at me.”  
Richie does. The looks of determination in Stan’s eyes almost overshadows the lost hours of sleep, or the fact that he must have cried in private before this conversation. “We _will_ fix him. Now eat your fucking soup.”

Richie eats his fucking soup.  
  


☆☆☆ 

_December 7th, 1993_

They couldn’t do much yesterday. 

Richie gave as many details as he could to Stan about what happened the night before, and why Eddie was alone in the Clubhouse instead of safe in Richie’s bed. His voice broke when he told him how Eddie kissed him, and how scared Richie was that he didn’t _mean_ it, how disgusted with himself he felt as he went to kiss back and thought _I’m taking advantage of him._  
Stan’s lips pressed into a thin line, then he said something on the lines of _we’ll tackle that issue another day_ , and then repeated to Richie that none of what happened was his fault for as long as it took for Richie to believe him. Richie’s still not convinced. 

He was so exhausted after that that he fell asleep again, and Stan, presumably, used the time to call all the other Losers and spare Richie the need to explain the events again. 

Stan gave him a lift home in his dad’s car just before lunch, and the excuse they came up with for skipping school wasn’t used, because as soon as Went opened the door he simply pulled Richie into a hug and thanked Stan for getting him home safe. 

Turns out that finding your best friend and the first boy you’ve ever loved irreparably broken does something to your body very akin to a fever, and so Richie got to skip school today as well without even asking. 

☆☆☆

_December 8th, 1993_

And today, too.  
Waking up and not seeing Eddie’s rumpled hair in the morning hurt too much, so now he sleeps on a rumpled pile of his blankets on the floor.. 

Bev calls at around 3PM and she can’t get the whole sentence _Richie, I’m so sorry,_ before he hangs up in her face.

☆☆☆

_December 9th, 1993_

He calls her back. He says he’s sorry, she tells him _she_ ’s sorry, he says _he must be so cold, I don’t want him to be cold_ , she says _I’ll bring him a blanket_ , but she’s crying so she has to start the sentence over three times, and he says _you don’t have to bring him a blanket, he’s fucking dead,_ and she says _I was the one who told him to kiss you_ and he says _yeah he mentioned, and then I did a killer impression of you_ and adds _I wanted to kiss him back so bad, but I didn’t_ and she says _you’ll get to try again._

☆☆☆

 _December 11th, 1993_

Turns out the fever was less about seeing the corpse of your best friend and more about sleeping in the cold December air with wet clothes on. It doesn’t help that Richie is still refusing to use his bed. 

Ben calls to tell him he found all the notes he took while fixing Eddie the first time around and that he went to the Clubhouse with Beverly to see Eddie’s...state. He says it like that, with a pause in the middle, like he’s looking for the most tactful word to use. The hope in his voice when he whispers _I think we can fix him, Richie_ brings the first genuine smile to Richie’s lips in days. 

He loves his friends fiercely. He doesn’t entertain the thought that there will be one missing from the list for much longer. 

☆☆☆ 

_December 15th, 1993_

Richie thinks he makes his fever fade away with the sheer strength of his impatience. 

The second his temperature goes down enough that his mom deems it acceptable for him to leave the house, Richie’s stumbling into a pair of shoes and spewing some excuse about going to Bill’s to catch up on his homework. 

It’s only partly a lie: he is going to Bill’s, but school is the furthest thing from his mind. 

Richie has a _plan_.  
See, he’s always had the tendency to get lost in his own head, which makes it impossible sometimes to focus on the things he’s not interested in—while, on the other hand, gives him the ability to hyperfocus, some would say to an unhealthy extent, on what he cares about. Usually he tries to reign it in to fool others into thinking he’s a functional human being, but this time he’ll use it to his advantage: if he lets his brain go where it wants, he can convince himself that fixing Eddie is just a project he’s invested in. A project that he wants, _needs_ , to see to its completion, yes—but detached from reality, to some extent. 

Like a videogame. Free from consequences in real life. 

If he goes a little manic over the whole thing, then so be it—his friends should be thankful: the other option is to have him break down into a panic attack every ten minutes at the thought of having lost Eddie for good, and that has to be exhausting to witness. 

So, yeah. That’s the plan: just don’t fucking _think_ about it, Richie, go only as insane as it’s necessary to bring him back.

He shows up at Bill’s house and, judging from Mrs. Denbrough’s face when she opens the door, he looks bad enough to shake her momentarily from the trance she fell into since Georgie was confirmed dead. Richie gives a quick _hello, hi, sorry, I need to see Bill?_ and then makes a bee-line to the stairs until he reaches his bedroom.  
Bill startles when Richie unceremoniously storms in—the first thing he notices is that he has eye bags dark enough to match Richie’s own. “F-fuck, Richie, you sc-scared me.”  
He stands up from his desk chair and wraps Richie in a hug so tight it might bruise his ribs, and still Richie sinks into it, willing it to warm him down to his bones. “I’m so s-sorry,” Bill mumbles somewhere in Richie’s sweaty hair (Eddie would have hated that) (He liked playing with his hair but only when it was clean, he forced Richie to start using conditioner, said he needed to take better care of it or he’d go bald by twenty-five) (Stop _thinking_ , Richie) and Richie sniffles, but doesn’t cry. 

“Not your fault, man.” He leans back from the hug, and offers Bill a pitiful excuse of a smile. “You need to stop doing that thing where you want to save the world from itself or whatever.”  
“Then what would be left of my personality?” Bill says, forcing the first genuine laughter out of Richie in days.  
“Your big gay crush on farmer boys,” he quips back, and Bill scoffs and rolls his eyes—which brings on another wave of grief and realization that almost sends Richie to his knees. 

Bill looks Richie in the eyes for a second too long, and it’s not like Richie thought he had solid walls put up, or that they would ever fool his friends anyway, but he could have gone without seeing all the concern and helplessness take shape in Bill’s face. Richie lets himself be guided to the bed.  
They sink on the mattress together, dead, sleep-deprived weights. “I need you to know,” he warns Bill, “that I am, at any given moment, two seconds away from bursting into tears. So don’t be too nice and earnest.”  
Bill sighs. “I’ll try my best. But, R-Richie—I know what it f-feels like to lose someone y-you love, and ha-having you and the rest of the Losers helped. S-so much.” He laughs humorlessly, and waves at the door with a tired hand. “God kn-knows I didn’t have my p-parents to rely on.”

 _It’s not the same_ , Richie thinks, _Georgie's dead and gone, Eddie is...something else._ It’s cruel, so he doesn’t say it, just frowns and closes his eyes to blink back the pain and sees split-second images of Eddie smiling and sleeping and arguing and laying on the ground with his face caved in—

He faces Bill. “That’s what I came here to do—ask for help.” And then he tacks on, because he feels raw enough already without all this emotional vulnerability: “O fearless leader.”

“You don’t need to ask,” Bill says, and together they gather up the other Losers and finally, _finally_ , get to work. 

☆☆☆ 

_December 16th, 1993_

Well, the others got to work.  
When they arrived at the Clubhouse armed with all the tools they used the first time around plus some more, they promptly locked Richie out. It might be because the moment he saw Eddie again for the first time, he immediately threw up. 

So yeah, today is better. Eddie’s legs are reattached to his torso, now! Progress!

☆☆☆ 

_December 19th, 1993_

It dawns on Richie that normal kids his age are excited for the imminent end of high school, or the start of the holidays, or because they were admitted to the college of their dreams.  
Richie hasn’t spared a thought to what, in his head at least, he’s been referring to as ‘meaningless real life bullshit’ in a long while. His parents seem worried, but hey, Ben figured out how to get Eddie’s neck to work again, so it’s all good. 

☆☆☆ 

_December 25th, 1993_

He dreams of Eddie that night.

They’re in bed together like they’ve been many times before, cocooned in the duvet and sheltered from the rest of the world. Eddie lets Richie hold him and pet gently at his face, long eyelashes fluttering at the touch, a small smile on his lips.  
“I’m in love with you,” Richie whispers, because at the moment that’s all that he is. His hands tremble when he strokes gently Eddie’s cheekbone.  
Eddie hums happily, but doesn’t open his eyes. “This is your fault,” he says instead, and then he stops moving at all. The smile freezes on his lips.  
“Eds?” Richie tries to ask, worried, and when he goes to cup his jaw again, the porcelain crumbles under his fingers, and Richie cries himself awake.

Merry fucking Christmas. 

☆☆☆ 

_December 29th, 1993_

“What do you mean you the elbows don’t _work_?”  
“Exactly what I fucking said, Molly Ringwald! They don’t fucking work!”  
“B-beep beep, Richie.”  
“Why don’t you beep my cock—”  
“ _Beep beep_ !”  
“Guys, just shut up a second! We just put the wrong gears in, we need the bigger ones for the pieces to actually fit together.”  
“Oh.”  
“Yeah, _oh_. Ben, can you pass me the flat head screwdriver? It’s an easy fix, relax.”

  
  
  


“How much longer, now?”  
“I’d say...two days?”

  
  


“O _h_.”

☆☆☆ 

_January 2nd, 1994_

Beverly lowers her paintbrush on the table, and gently blows over the area she just finished painting. There’s only Richie and Mike to keep her company today, although they’ve been mostly watching her work, huddled up in their jackets. 

The last spot she painted was over Eddie’s cheekbone. The line between porcelain and wood, where they’ve replaced what was too broken to be glued back together, is hardly noticeable under the layer of acrylic.  
“Done,” Bev says, and turns to look at Richie. “We’ve fixed everything.”  
Mike smiles, and circles an arm around Richie’s shoulder to tug him into a celebratory hug—but Eddie stays intact and unmoving on the chair they’ve propped him up on, so what is there to celebrate, really?

☆☆☆ 

_January 6th, 1994_

This time, it’s just Richie. 

In the past few days the Losers have tried their best to stay positive and exude an almost violent aura of optimism around Richie when they catch him looking more dejected than the new usual. They’ve had mixed results—after all, the one who broke the tension when needed (and sometimes when not) has always been Richie, and now that he’s the one who lets the silences stretch for too long, the others are scrambling to do his job for him. 

Well, all except Stan. Richie deeply appreciates and admires his refusal to take a step away from his _I’m so done with everything and anything_ attitude to life—it’s proven to be a much needed taste of normalcy. 

The fact is, now that The Project, as Richie has been referring to it in his head, is done, is not so much as a project anymore and more like visiting everyday the corpse of your taxidermied friend.  
Eddie _looks_ fine, he’s back to normal, every piece in the right place, one might even say that he looks like he’s _sleeping—_ oh, how lovely, such a realistic sculpture of a boy! Who’s the artist? _Who’s the artist?_ —but the truth is, it’s still an empty shell. 

Richie wishes he knew what brought Eddie to life last time. They never found out, in the end. 

And today, it’s only Richie here in the Clubhouse, intent, as he’s lately been, on staring dejectedly at this doll that once was Eddie.  
“Eds, I don’t know what to do,” he whispers, helpless, and carefully brushes his thumb over Eddie’s knuckles. “I would pray, but I don’t know who to.”

Pain builds up in the back of his nose, and Richie groans as he starts to cry _again_.  
That’s the only thing he’s been doing lately, crying at random intervals, every time he snaps back out of his haze to be faced with reality. “I don’t know what to do,” he mumbles again, feeling small, feeling useless. He keeps petting Eddie’s hand as tears blur his vision, and he leans down to press a clumsy kiss on the delicate fingers.  
Putting them together was the trickiest part, and not even Ben was sure if they’d done a good job or not: the parts are so small, and there was no way to know if a gear or screw vital for the intricate mechanism had been lost and never found. And to think, Eddie had been so proud of his handwriting, always calling Richie’s own chicken scratches unreadable and copying his notes for him, so smug about how nice they came out, and now—what if they fucked up his hands for good—God, fuck, so _stupid_ , he can’t even _check_ —

Richie startles back with a gasp.  
“Oh my God,” he says, and scrambles to get a pen and a piece of paper. He does, he does have a way to check—hasn’t Eddie taught him how specifically in case he needed to? _You'd be the only person alive who knows how to activate me_ , Eddie had said, and they both thought it would never come to that, but here they are. Here they fucking are.  
“Please work, please work,” Richie repeats, frantic. He positions Eddie’s arms on the table, and carefully curls his fingers around the pen. Fortunately the right side of Eddie’s torso didn’t take much damage, and the panel is still there where Richie remembers it being; he holds the shirt they’ve draped Eddie in up, and pushes over the area until it pops open to show a neat row of brass buttons. 

Richie hesitates. What was the code? It was a date, Dr. K’s kid’s birthday...November 30? Yeah, that was it.  
He positions his fingers on the right buttons, and the small lever on the side that he recalls being the one for zero. 

_One, one, three, zero._ Richie holds his breath, and waits. 

There’s a click. _There’s a click_ , and then Eddie bends his neck to look at the page and shifts his arms like he’s settling in to actually write something.  
“Oh fuck,” Richie exclaims, heart in his throat, “it worked! Eddie?” He wraps a shaky hand around his shoulder, but Eddie gives no sign of recognition—or, for what it matters, no sign that he’s aware he’s been touched—and Richie realizes, with an overwhelming wave of disappointment and nausea, that he might have activated the mechanism, but it’s not _Eddie_.  
He drops his forehead on Eddie’s shoulder, and sobs for a few long minutes. “I guess that would have been too easy, uh?” he says eventually, laughing with no humour. 

He remembers suddenly that Eddie also taught him the sequence needed to make him write Richie’s name. Might as well torture himself some more, right? Even the _illusion_ of life sounds too good to be true right now.  
It takes a while for him to recall what the sequence was, but when he figures it out he punches it in with no hesitation. Still draped over Eddie’s form, he peers down at the paper, and watches as Eddie’s hand _moves_ , and writes down, in the pretentious cursive he’s learned to know, _Richie_. 

_Richie, comma._

Wait. 

_First of all: fuck you._

His breath dies in his lungs. Mouth hanging open, heart lodged somewhere in his throat, Richie sits back and watches as Eddie, unprompted, fills the page. 

_Richie,_

_First of all: fuck you. You’re not supposed to be reading this. If I find out you did, I swear to you I’ll kick your shins so hard you’ll be one big bruise for a month._

_I can’t fucking believe it. How dare you, with what audacity, do you say straight to my face that I’m making all of this shit up? You think it was CUTE? I felt nothing at all for decades and then, boom!, I open my eyes and the first thing I see is you passed out on me, and I’m pretty sure you were snoring as well ALSO YOU WERE FUCKING DROOLING YOU DICKHEAD.   
I didn’t imprint on you like a baby bird, dumbass. You’re abrasive, and annoying, and crude, and so many more things that should, reasonably, inspire in people the urgent desire to punch you in the face. Your stupid clothes, your stupid glasses, your stupid painted nails. _

_Fuck, Richie, but I like you so much. Beverly smirked and laughed when I told her, because she already knew, which means that I’ve been awfully transparent to everyone with eyes, WHICH MEANS that you’re more so of an idiot for looking so shocked when I tried to kiss you.  
So shocked! Was there really anything to be shocked about? In what world do I find out what kissing is and not want to do it with you, always, with no respite?  
You touch me, Richie, constantly—your big hands on my shoulders, my neck, my face ~~I can’t I just~~  
I started feeling things, and then the only thing I wanted to feel was you. _

_You stupid idiot. ”It’s not real, Eddie, you’re confused, you child, you doll!” Fuck you. Fuck you fuck you FUCK YOU how dare you I look at you and I want so much ~~I~~ ~~want you inside me~~ Fuck! I can’t even do that it’s so UNFAIR! _

_I’m not a fucking poet, alright? And again, you shouldn’t be reading this. I don’t know why I ran away, the more I stay here crying like goddamn idiot the more I wish I was curled up in bed with you. I ~~want to apologize~~ I’d make you apologize to me, you bastard. I’d kiss you again! I don’t give a shit there I said it fuck you I choose to live in a fantasy world where you would kiss me back. What are you gonna do about it? You and your stupid frog face. I fucking hate you. Please come here, I miss you already. Let me hold you, let me kiss you, I’m ~~scared~~ in love with you. Is that really so bad? _

_You make me brave, Richie. I wish I could return the favor._

Richie is sobbing again by the time Eddie’s hand stills on the paper. The letter is merely half a page,and somehow the cursive warps into a less precise script the more it goes on, like Eddie was distressed while he wrote it the first time around—right after his fight with Richie, apparently. His mechanism must have...archived the words, or something, a trace of his last hours of life.  
He touches Eddie’s fingers, still clasped around the pen, and wishes fervently he’d thought to do it as Eddie was writing, just to feel them move under his own.  
He presses his lips to Eddie’s temple instead. The porcelain is cool and smooth; pretty, but you couldn’t mistake it for real skin no matter what. “I can’t believe you’re not sentient and still found a way to insult me,” he says there, and smiles even as his heart cracks some more. “When the fuck did you have the time to write this?” Another kiss; a weak smile. “And I’m in love with you, too, by the way.”

His eyes fall again on the letter. _You make me brave, Richie._ _I wish I could return the favor._

Richie’s been scared his entire life. He thinks that for Eddie he could, he will, make an exception.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was super long, one of the reasons why it took what feels like a decade to finish. I split into two, so expect the next one pretty soon (in, like, three days or so. Less if I edit it fast) because it's already finished. I promise the angsty stuff is almost over!


	13. Chapter Thirteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised. 
> 
> Warnings for blood and self-harm for the purpose of a ritual.

So Eddie likes him. So Eddie wants him, and loves him and kissed him simply, incredibly!, because he felt like it. 

And who is Richie to stand between Eddie and what he wants? 

Richie doesn't even bother drying his tears, he's so used by now to have them wetting his face. A weird but familiar energy buzzes under his skin—the letter, seeing Eddie’s words on paper, reminded him how much of a _spitfire_ Eddie was, and now Richie feels retroactively stupid about the weeks spent pitying himself. He needs to take action now, he can’t physically wait a second longer.

The idea of not getting Eddie back right goes from an inevitable reality he was succumbing to, to the _unthinkable_. Some—some force, some _presence_ , was powerful enough to bring him to life and _this_ is how it ends? No, no, fuck that. What sense would that make? How is that _fair_? Richie could have a fistifight with the Sun right now and _probably win_ , he’s so viscerally angry.   
"Alright, Eds," he grunts as he lifts Eddie over his shoulder. Fuck, he forgot how damn heavy he is. "Fuck this! Fuck it all. We're going to Neibolt and then I'll—" He hesitates, faced with the fact that he has no plan. "I'll scream until someone answers. Or until the cops are called, we'll see which one comes first." 

Getting up the ladder without the help of both hands is quite difficult, and there's much creative swearing—plus a moment where Richie stops midway to yell in frustration—before he manages to get Eddie out. 

It sort of helps, sort of doesn't, that Eddie's limbs stay locked in place when Richie is not actively moving them. One of the pros is that when Richie sets him down on the back of his bike like he did so many months ago, there's no grotesque flapping around of hands and necks, just a tidy _click_ when he bends Eddie's knees the right way. Getting used to treating Eddie like a fragile doll again is a god-awful feeling, and Richie hates himself that much more for it. 

The sun sinks down the line of the horizon as he’s still pedaling to Neibolt Street.   
Richie can barely breathe with the elastic rope tied so tight around his chest and waist, but he wasn’t going to risk having Eddie fall off—he is, unconsciously, reliving the same lines of thought he did back in July. Even the static electricity in the air as he approaches the abandoned House is familiar as it is unsettling. This time he doesn’t regret or wish the Losers were here with him. He feels an obligation to replicate the same steps, just in reverse, that he went through the first time around, and who knows if having his friends with him could ruin everything, or even put them in danger. 

It’s not that doing this alone feels _right_ —it’s that it seems like a necessary punishment. 

The House comes in sight. The heels of Richie’s boots drag on the ground as he slows his bike, and when he finally stops the recoil pushes Eddie closer on his back; he imagines it’s Eddie’s way of encouraging him. _You’re not really alone_ , he can picture him saying, with that lilt in his voice that Eddie tried so hard to hide under pretend annoyance.   
“Okay,” Richie whispers to himself, and to Eddie. “I can do this. Get in there, summon a god or whatever, get you back.” A shaky sigh. A feeling like a storm is coming, hairs raised at the nape of his neck. “Get you back…”   
Some maneuvering later, and Eddie’s rigid body is back in his arms. _Just like rigor mortis!_ a Voice says cheerfully in his head, which he guesses is his hysteria, if hysteria sounded like the lady on Channel 5 who talks about mattresses like they’re a gift from God during every commercial break—and wow, yeah, Richie is fucking _losing_ it.

He tries incredibly hard to ignore the panic, and the weakness in his knees, and the dead weight of Eddie slumped over his shoulders as he pushes the House’s door open with a foot. The dread he feels when faced with the humid darkness that the door uncovers has nothing to do with gods and turtles ( _turtles?)_ —it is, simply, the primordial fear of the unknown. Richie feels the same fear when he switches off the light in the living room on his way upstairs, late at night, and something deep inside of him whispers to _run_.

The door creaks. Richie startles and clutches Eddie’s arm tighter. 

Well, maybe not quite the same fear.

He walks inside anyway. 

“Last time I was in here,” he says to Eddie, because if he doesn’t distract himself somehow he’s going to burst into panicked tears, “it didn’t look this fucking creepy.”  
Eddie stays silent. Yeah, _no shit._ _  
_ “Have I mentioned that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing? Because, man, I feel like that bears repeating.”   
Richie stops long enough to retrieve the small flashlight he stuffed in his pocket back at the Clubhouse, and then he makes his way deeper into the house, trying his best not to imagine anything lurking in the shadows. Initially his idea is to go back to the room where he found Eddie the first time, then he changes his mind and he turns 

_To your right_

to his right at the last second, and goes down a narrow hallway.   
The peeling wallpaper, which might have had a floral pattern once upon a time, brushes against his shoulders as he trudges forward. At the end of what feels like an impossibly long tunnel (is the house stretching, somehow?), his flashlight shows him a set of stairs that lead seemingly to nowhere and more likely to a basement Richie doesn’t have enough light to properly illuminate.   
The light suddenly flickers and leaves him in darkness. Eddie’s weight on his shoulders becomes heavier and heavier, to the point where Richie’s knees are about to give out, and the fear in his lungs turns to terror, and there’s a grating sound like Eddie’s head is twisting to look at him, except that Eddie is _dead_ so that’s impossible, and what if what Richie is holding so tight against his body is not Eddie anymore, what if he turns his neck just so and sees yellow fangs smiling back at him—this was—a terrible, awful—idea, this was—

_Leave the kid alone_

MAKE ME

_Never forget you exist because because I willed it so_

BET YOU REGRET THAT NOW

_Enough of this_

I̵̼̍ ̵̧͗S̴͍͆Ȧ̶̤I̷̙͑D̵̜͐ ̶̖̀M̵̰͛Á̵͕K̴̰E̵̬̓ ̴͕͗M̸̤͝Ȩ̸̈́

_Haven’t you hurt these kids enough?_

I̴̖̫̖̔̾͋͂͊’̸̫̀̇͊M̸̹̻̣̂̇ͅ ̶̧̡̰͇̃̂͘͜Ṱ̴̢̬̫͕̐̌̊͠H̸̠̙̽̔E̴̘̐̒͛̈́̈́ ̶̻͙̙͚͉̣̎̇̐̎̀͝D̸̤͚͑̿͒̌Ě̷̛̳͊̚V̵̨̻͈̹̻̀̃̀͂̇͘ͅƠ̷̟͙̼͎̎̀Ų̷̹̰́̄̊̌̄̚R̷͍͆̆͑̐̀̉Ē̶̞̻̥̬̲̪Ř̴͙̲͖͈̳̩̎͂͘ ̸̣̏̽̆͝Ó̸̪̮͝F̴̳͓̬͌̑͘ ̸̲̫͌͐̀̔͘Ẁ̵̮͐̽̃͒Ọ̸͒́̈͊̕R̴̲͈̣̓̂L̸͍̂̒̀̀Ḓ̴̻̩͕̯̄͌̚͝S̶̬͎͈̖͉̒͝

 _I’ve heard this spiel before._ _  
_ _Does it always have to come to this?_

_Ḯ̴̢̢̢̡̻̫͕̝̪̟̟͓̭͙̰͙̖͖̪̝̣̱̰̠̙̜̲̰̘͉̣̥̱̽̈́̈́̓̾͆̎̔̕͜͝ͅ ̶̡̨̨̟͕͙͎͈͇͍͇̖̙̜̗̖̲̳̦͇̿͜W̶̧̧̜̭͙̱̬͔̦͖̰̐̑̃̒Ǐ̵̛͙̜̫̉̃̔̐͗͗̈͒͠L̶̤̥̱̬͇̱̜͍̗͕̲͉̫̎́̈́̔͂̅̚L̷̢̡̡̧̛͓̤͓̪͍̣̬̱̞̘̤̮͚̳͍̹͓̜͇͉̫̯͖͔̺̅̅̆̋̂̈̆̅̽̈́́̋͋͊̃̾̒̆̊̽͗̏̉͝ ̴̛̻̼̯̘͈̦͈͚̱͓̤͇̜̤̹̓̈̄͂̾̒͑͆̉̇̿̑́͗̈́̂̕͘̚̚͝Ę̷̨̡̢̧̹͚̖̮͎̥͙͚̹̝̼͕̯̱̣͎̝̯̳̺͎̬̯̣̪̮͗̀͊͐̇̿̂̓̔̓̃̎͐̓̏͘̕̚͜͝͝ͅǍ̶̢͙̮̰̥̯͚̟͇̈̍̀T̶̢̧̢̨̛̳̥̮̪̱̝͇̣̱̟̯̱͇͕̮͉͈̩̘̮̿̒̈̍͋͐͆́̊́̋̔͗̈́̿̏̋̇̋͑̋̑̚͘̕͠ͅͅ ̵̯͚̩̪͉̪̖̖̬̔̅̔͊͘̕͝ͅỶ̴̨̨̛̳͍͍͖̞̞͉̠͍̹̰̻̘̪͈̽̃̇̆͂̆͐͜͠Ö̶̖̲̦͇̦̙̩̥͔͇̺̜̣̞̣̫̩̹͉̼͕̱͖̠̯͈̟̪̰̹́̄̇̎̍̾̏̎̂̌̈́̆̋̉̃̐̌̔͑͛̈́̓̅̓̌͛̓̒͘͘͝ͅU̵̡̫̲̝͚̯͚̰͔̭̜̙̜̘̟̩̥̘̘̰̟͛ͅͅ ̸̹͉̆͌̃́̂͒̈̅̔̓̃̎̍̀͊̐̿͂̄̎̔̀̆͛̓͘̕͝͝Ẅ̸̧͓͎̤͙̲͓̯̗̪̲͉͇̩̻̟̖̫̠́̓͆͆͋̑͑͒̈́̓̇̑̿̆͆̕͜͠H̷̡̨̢̧̨̼̦̠̙̜̻͔̮̹̩̤͈̠̪͓̪̺̬͍̝̟̞̗̅̍͛̇̎͗̓͛̈́͒̃͂̐̂̑̎͗̑̓͌͒͊͑̈́̔̓̒͑̎̚͘͝͝͝ͅǪ̸͚̻̺̱͍͕̯͖̦̝̤̠̦͔́̋̈́L̷̛͈͓̲̯̈́̄͛̾̀̈́̎͐̄̑̄͐͑̔͋̋̍͆͛̓̏͂̆̀̈́̑̇̋̀̕̕̚͜͝͝͝ͅĔ̸̺͉̫̦̳̼̤͎̂̾̈̿͒̓̎̔̓͝͠_

_I’m so tired of you. Just go._

Į̵̢̧̖̦̱͕̳̯̯͍͙̹̫̹̬̞͖̱̺̦̘͉̟̣̪̻̯̦̱̯̲̼̺͙̜͍̺̲̮̩̥͇̞̏̈́̏̂̓͐̾̍̌̔̿̾̂͗̇͋̽͛̒̈̓͌̽̊̐͌̉̚̚̚͜͝͝ ̸̨̧̨͕͔͔̟͎̠͇̠͇͇̳̤͈͍̜͖͕̯̩̯̗͇͇͓̮̼̫̤̳͈͎͖͖̪̖̦̤̗̞̠̭̤̟̝̫̞͍̼̘͉̼͉̯̭̰̗̤͙̀̿͆Ẁ̷̧̨͎͔͎͙̥̜̞̭̱̭̱͕͚̝̺͓̥̮̤̣͇̠̥̩̹͔̰͒̔͐̓̌͆̓̎̇͆̄̈́͑͐̅͆͋͒̍͐̏̓̅̏͐̏̈͊̆̐̇̑͘͜͜͠͝͝͠͝ͅA̵̮̰̫̘͖͚͔̗̥̘̘̹̺̿͐͌ͅS̴̡̧͕̱̤̠̰̯͕̭̼̯̗̹̬̺̩̤̙̼̣͚̹͉̘̣̬͓̙̝̞̾̓̈́̇̾̀̊̏̊̓̈́͜͝ ̶̨̨̨̡̧̢̢̨̨̢̺̟̝̯̙̗̭̜̖̫̤̰̰̫̘̼̱̭͉̺͓̙̹͙͎̞͔̙̯̜͎̩̺̹̠̭̺̬̹͈͚̳̤̳̥̹͎͎̭̞̉̇̓̏͂̆͐́͛̆̀͛͛͊̈́́̒͑̀̑̑̔̋̓͌̓̏̌̍͋͒̈́̽̃̄͒͆̈́́̒̊̓̋͛̈́͂̓̾̈́̚̕̕͜͠͠͝ͅͅT̸̡̡̧̨̥̫̺̫͍̹̫̯̣͔̖̗̯͓̞̝͖̤͕̙̟͇͉̬̰̰̭̠͓̏̓̒͒́͝ͅH̴͉̹̳̙͙̉Ȩ̵̢̥̫̭̳̗̞͙̝̱͙̘͈͓͍̥͖̜̤͖͓͓̻͖̥͕̓̌̐̽͛̈̅͌͗̂̽̄͊̆̓͛̓̏͊̈́́͌̇̓̓̏͒̐͐̈́̈́̾͒̇͛̽̇̊̋̂͊̓̋̒͋̆̏̊͘̕̚͘͜͝͝͝͝͝ͅ ̵̛̭̌́̅̑̉̔̆̋̓̑̐̑̍̿̀̒̀̈́̅͌̋̔̂̀̃̈́̔̂̐̂̆̉͂̐̈́͆̐̓̂̏̓̂͋̾̎͌̕͘̚͘̕͝͝͝͝ͅB̶̡̡̡̢̡̨̨͇̝̙̘̺͚̱̪͙͔͚̪͔̼͚̠̳̼̪̫̲̦̳̰̥͖̠͎̝̙͉̲̫͖̝͖̱͔̱̲̜̫̰̳̰̮̞̻̦͈̙̞̯̦̊̀̆͒̄̔̚͜Ȩ̶̡̧̡̡̢̡̛͓̱̰͓̹̱͓̯̤̳̳̮͈̻̯͇̠͔̜̠̼͕̹̭̣͙̪͕̙̭͖̗̦̹̺̙̖̘͖͎̹̪͕̦̩͕̠͓̬̙̤̅̓̆̽̂̓̇̉͊͗̍̾̄̿́͆̆̀̇͂̀͑̉́̏̈́̐͊͜͝͝ͅͅG̶̡͚͇͔̘̞̽̎̊͛̏͋͌̐̑̈́̒̽̓͂͋̿̍̀̋̿̀̔̄̐͒̈̃̽͒̒̓̑̍͛͑̌͐̚͠͠͝Į̵̧̡̢̛̱̖̤̣͖̯̥̞̟̠͍͔̹̩͔̲͕̪̜̩̠̼̯͕̟̣̖̘̘̘̮̫̦̼͈͎̳̦̜̬̬̙͚̻̳̿̋͗͛̄̅̈́͑̾̄̀̇̾̕͜ͅÑ̵̨̨̨̛̛̮̜̫̩͍̪̮̥̱̪͉̝̫̲̤͔͍̟̤̲̦̙̜̹̘͖̜̳̽̓̇̍͊͑̋̃͋̐̎̿͘Ņ̸̡̡̝̭̥̰̘̻̭̫̩̯̩̜͖̫̫̩̟̗͙͕̪̠̭̠̞͕͖̝̠̞̥̣͖͔̪͈͚̺͎̱̥̞͗͒̑̓͒̽̓͌̆͐̓̀͜͝Į̵̢̨̛͕͈͍͎̼̰͚̲̩̳̘͓͉͇̬̥̻̮͎̪͍̒̄̾̉͊̾̈́̾̔̈́̈͛̒́͛͌̌̓̽̉̄͘͝Ņ̶̢̨͇̖̲̬̜̫̬̤̺̜̥̮̼̺̬̪͖̹̜̯͚̠͍̠̟̱͎̲̝̯̼̫̰̺͖̫͍̥̼͎̖͉̙̮̲̹̺̟͔̺̺̰͓̭͛͂̍͌̑̋̅̒̇̋͌͗̎͑̓̄̈͊̊͒̓̍̓͊̕͘͜͜͜͝͠͠͝G̶̢̧̨̛̟͇̼̙͙̥͙̳̘̗͓̱͈͔̱̰̰̗̖͇̹͚̩̻̳͍̬̦̘̙̭͚͈̳̎̐̉̈́̿̓̾͋̑̽̐͑̈̈́͗̾̋̂̏͂͐̉̓͛͑̀̔̉̒̏̿̓̉͘͘͘̕̕̕͝͝͠ ̶̨̢̢̧̘̲̳̝̘͕̠̭̣͉͙̱̲̜̩̙̗̭̭̞̜͈̬̗͕̠̤̳̝͖̩̙͔̣͕̞͖͙̱̫͇̳̪̒̅̅̀͆̈́̓̄̈́̅͊̽͂̎̐͌͑͜ͅI̶̢̧̢̡̡̧̛̫̪͍̼̪͕͈̠͕̤̠̪̥͓͖̤̳͔̩̼̙̪̥̪̥̠̹̞̲̪̗̥̘͚̤̘̐̈́̋͆̒̃͂͌̈́̍̚͘̚ͅͅ ̵̡̧̡̨̨̧̧̛̛̛̛͖̪͚̺͍̰̬̜̝̱̖͖͕̮̺̤̱͈͔̲̦̺̦̞̙̬͇͔͇͕̺̭͔͖̫̤̜͈̘͇͉͇̳̲̩̱͕̋͒̌͑͊͐̀̀͂̇̇̆̽͐̅͂͂͑͋̑͗͆̋̋͑͛̿͋̉̇̔̐̂̾̑̿͂͑̆͐̏̈́̐̂̔̎͗͗̋̓̿̒͐͐̕͘̚͠͝͝͝͠W̷̧̨̨̧̧̡̰̯͔̯͉̭̘̭̜̗̼̖͕͍͇͓͖̯̮̖̬̟͚̫̰̦͙̬͉͓͈̩̹͔͙͕͇̳̼̯̗͙̠̥͙̟͔̤̎̆́͆͋͊̇ͅI̵̛̛̱̖̾͑̽̌̃̿̑̔̑̑̍̊̒̾́͛͊̈́́͗̔̿̾̽̆̏̈̑̍̈̆̓̐͗̐̍́͋̈́͑̅̍̇̕͘͘̚͝͝L̶̛̛̹͓̖̻͍̝̞͖̘̬̗͔͇̰͉͈͑̆̃̉̈͆̒͊̊̌͆̇͛͗̄̔̆̽̉̅͛̍̃́̚͘͝L̵̡̨̧̧̧̗̹͕̘̯̙̱̗̰̱͖̰͍̞͕̪͚̹̗̜͔̖̮̙͙̠̦̰̭̳̮̯̩̗̤̫̞̬̳̹͙͕̜͇̣̼̯̾̓͛͑̈́̾̈́̀́̓͌̉̽̒̈́̏̒͊͊͌̌̊̉̂̑̓͆̾̆̾͐̋̾̔̚͘͘͜͝͝͠ͅͅͅͅͅ ̶̡̛̛̛̻̼̙̮̰͓̖͍̬̇̄͊͋̆̆̑̉̽̽̎̓̂͆͋̐̽͂̆̍̇̌͋̑̅̆̌̀́͗͂͛̾͆̄͆͛͐̚̕͜ͅḄ̶̡̨̡̡̢̛̮̤̳͔͕͔͔̼̠͇̞̬̲̫̮̤̬͔̪̻͎̗͎̼͈̺͚̺͍͙̹͖͕͈̟̭͍͓̲̻̞͉̰̬̼͖̓̅̑̽͊̔̐̉̓͂̆̑̌̿̈́̔̈́̔̽̓̓̈́̄̈́̍̒̓͆̓́̅̔̄̅̂̓͌͆̒͒̿̈́̇̾̂̈́̈́̈͒̒̍̕̕̕̚͘̕̚͜͜͝͝͝͝͝Ę̵̨̧̨̢̺̖͓̗͔̩̠̮̬̣̰̭͔̟̥̭̪̭͕̘̥͉͍̬͇͔̹̜͉̠̤̘̙͙̍̽̓̆̓̽͛̉̄͆̒̏̎̀̕͝͠ͅͅͅͅ ̸̧̲͈̩̺̰̪̬̰̩̰͔͕͈̜̄͊͑͝T̵̛̺̟̾̐͒̈́̅̄̏̔̅͗̏͐̇̀̐̈́͗̆̍̅̒̅̈́̈̔̎̍͊̌͋̓̓̃͘̕͝͝Ḩ̸̢̨̛̛̛̺̥̳̥͈̤͓̱̪̩̞̣͙̣̥͈̣̼͉͈͈̯͚͎̝͕̬̞͇̳̭̱̺̭̙̠̞̬̥̫͔͇̝̞͈̟͖͖̹͓̰͔͂͒̔͋̋̓́̅̀͊́͒̂͋̃̑͗̍̑͐̀͋͑͗̌̅̔̀̌͂͋̔̓̌͊̿̓̾͌̂̅͆̇̐̚̕̚̚͜͝͝͠ͅͅE̶̡̢̡̡̧̛̛̛̠̙͖̲̼͍͖̯̠̠͉̗̪̬̰͔̥̪̮̺̩̤̻̫̭̖̲͋̆̎̾̆͌͑̐͐̍̑̓͛̊̀̔̇̃̾̎̈́̌͒̃̋̋̔̽̓͋̈́͋̌̂̍̎͑̔̈́̊̂̉̂͑͐͐͌̃̿͒̍͌̇̕͘͝͝͝ ̸̨̧̢̧̖̗̤͓͇̣͓͖̩͔̲̥̤̠̼̙͈̼̤̪̳̮̠̬̲̩̜͍͚͎̯̥͕̣̬͖͎̦͉͈̬̠͖̐̏̈́̀͊̔͆̈́͛̏̂͋̓̀̔́̂̂͑̈̄̍͆͜͝͠͝ͅȨ̴̢̧̛͇̩̻̞̫͙̭͎̰͙̗̠̱̹̪̼̗͙̺̬͎̳̬͖͚͗̓̂̐͂̀͛̃͒͋̓̈́͑̑̂͊̇͋̋̊͗̈́̓̊̔̈́̅͆̄̍̅͘̚̚̚͠͝͝ͅṆ̴̢̧̨̡̧̘̼̟̪̯̥̩̠͚͇̥͔͇͓̥̹͈̞̝͖̩̦̬̜̿̀̓̑ͅD̷̜̲̲͙̈́͊͆̌̎̓̈́̚̚̚

  
  
  
  
  


_Pathetic._ _  
_ _Richie. Richie? You’re close, kid, come on._

Richie hoists Eddie higher on his shoulders and clears his throat. He hopes he doesn’t have to walk much longer; for a second there, it felt like he was losing all his strength at once. His heart thunders in his chest as he goes down the stairs, stepping closer and closer to the deep arch of shadows that hide the basement. 

The temperature drops. Richie’s impression that the House is morphing around him grows tenfold, and he finds himself in a room too cavernous for a building this size. His eyes, bordering on useless on a good day, take a long time to get used to the darkness, and even then the only thing Richie can see is a well six feet in front of him.  
He lowers Eddie to the ground, because it feels like the right thing to do and Richie’s legs were about to give out. He tries to smooth Eddie’s hair as best as he can, unwilling to leave him on the cold stone floor, but when he realizes he can’t see whether he’s making things worse or not he gives up, though it pains him. 

Well. What now? He came here with exactly no plan. Should he start praying or 

_The well_

make a fucking circle with salt, draw a pentagram, what the hell is he supposed 

_Look inside the well. I’ve been waiting for you_

to do— 

Richie startles out of his thoughts. “What—who are you?”

 _Some call me Maturin. Others the Turtle God._ _  
_ _The well, Richie, while my brother is incapacitated, look inside the well_

Richie may be used to hearing his own Voices speak in his head from time to time, but this is on a whole other level. At every word his stomach drops in a sinking feeling he recognizes from the only time he went on a rollercoaster, and Richie thinks _how does he know my name?_

_I, unfortunately, know everything. It makes falling asleep quite difficult_

“Have you tried taking melatonin?” he says, because at his core Richie is a fucking idiot. Is he cracking jokes in presence of a god, right now? Is that what’s happening? 

_You’re a peculiar little human, Richie._ _  
_ _Will you please come look in the well, now? Don’t make me do all the work._

Richie has never been so viscerally scared of doing something in his entire life.  
“Whatever you say, man,” he says and stumbles in the dark closer to the grey bricks of the well. “I mean, Maturin. Sir. Lord?”   
Maturin-sir-lord doesn’t clarify which title he prefers, so Richie figures his best option is shutting the fuck up. His outstretched hands touch the rough texture of stone, and Richie resists the urge to look back at Eddie only because he knows he won’t be able to see him anyway.   
He leans forward until the edge of the well digs uncomfortably in his diaphragm, and his eyes catch somewhere at the bottom the reflection of a weak light. Richie takes in a shuddering breath, ignores how his glasses are slipping down his nose, thinks again _get you back,_ and looks

  
  
  
  
  


at Eddie, standing in front of him. Richie gasps, feels tears well up in his eyes. 

Eddie’s framed by a great big wall of nothing. Solid, black nothing, in every direction, as far as the eye can see—under Eddie’s sensible shoes, behind the edges of his slicked back hair, in the spaces between his swishing shorts as he walks around aimlessly.  
This, Richie barely registers in the back of his mind, too full of striking relief and sudden exhaustion to care about anything else. _Eddie_ , alive and well, looking back at Richie with raised eyebrows as if he wasn’t expecting to receive visits.   
“Eds,” Richie says, smiling widely for the first time in weeks. He laughs around a sob and takes the few steps through the black nothingness to squeeze Eddie in a hug. “Thank _fuck_ , oh my God, I didn’t think—Eddie, Eddie Spaghetti,” he mumbles in his neck, wrapping his arms tighter around his waist, feeling his solid weight against his body.   
“No one calls me Eds,” Eddie says, which—what? Richie was expecting, longing for, even!, to be reprimanded for the nickname, to hear the familiar _don’t call me that_ after so long of going without.   
Richie leans back, but he keeps his hands around Eddie’s shoulders. “Wh—what do you mean?”   
“That's not my name,” the other explains. His face remains expressionless.   
Richie, still drunk on the relief and the sight of Eddie safe and sound, lets out a wet laugh. "I know, I know, dumbass—you told me you like it when I call you Eds! You told me you like it, don't think I forgot!" He pulls Eddie back in the hug, overwhelmed.

"I haven't been hugged in a while," Eddie comments, patting an awkward hand on Richie's back.

Richie squeezes his eyes against the wave of guilt swelling up in his chest. "I know," he says, miserable, his face still hidden in the crook of Eddie's neck. The skin there is uncharacteristically cool; Eddie had been warmer before he—before. "I'm so, _so_ sorry."

The other hums. "That's hardly your fault. Who are you, anyway?"

Richie sniffs, and leans back. "What do you mean—are you okay, Eddie?"

"I'm...something," he says, seemingly indifferent to Richie's palms cupping his face, Richie's forehead touching his. Richie can't bear to pull away, despite the tendrils of doubt making their way into his mind. "I haven't been anything in a long while, let alone okay. Forgive me if I need some time to adapt."

Eddie's voice is all wrong. The cadence too calm, the accent one that Richie hasn't heard come out of his mouth since those first days after Eddie came to life, when he still spoke like a black and white movie character. He hasn't sworn once, which should have been the first warning sign, really. 

He stumbles back, fear thundering in his ears. "You're not my Eddie," he says, voice breaking on the name. "Who the fuck—can someone tell me! What the fuck is happening!"

_You're right, that's not the Eddie you knew_

Richie startles and almost falls on his ass on the endless expanse of black under his feet. He bites back a curse, not wanting to offend the...Turtle God, or whatever the fuck, who has taken the habit of speaking directly inside his head. “So who is—wait, are you...Edward? Dr. K’s kid?”  
Non-Eddie ( _imposter!_ screams some part of Richie, sending him straight down the Uncanny Valley when he looks back into those familiar eyes and sees nothing of the boy he loves) nods, and curls his lips into an approximation of a smile. “Edward Kaspbrak, yes.”

_The original!_

If cosmic entities speaking to you through telepathy could sound cheerful, it would be a good descriptor of Maturin’s tone. Richie’s heart, which hasn’t been in the best of shapes lately, cracks neatly in half.   
“The original?” he echoes, and curls his trembling hands into fists.

 _Yes, the original—in this universe, at least._ _  
_ _You don’t sound so pleased, Richie._

“I didn’t,” Richie tries to say, but the painful knot in his throat makes him stutter. “I thought you would help me here, sir. Lord? Maturin. This is not...no offense, Edward, but you’re _not_ the one I’m trying to bring back.”   
Edward seems incapable of taking offense to anything. “I understand. We’ve never met, and truth to be told, I like it here, with all the other kids.” At Richie’s confused expression, he adds: “The other kids that were killed by Pennywise.”

_Ah, yes. That would be my brother, Edward—I apologize for the inconvenience_

A gentle hum. “Oh, no need to apologize, it’s been so long. It was scary, finding out I was dead, but the other children kept me company.”

 _That’s good, that’s good. I’ll make sure no others will join your ranks._ _  
_ _I brought you here to speak with Richie, which I’m afraid is the best I can do in my condition. I was under the impression he wanted to speak to you, at least one last time_

“So I’ll go back to my friends, eventually?”

_Of course, Edward_

“Well, it’s alright then.”

Richie gapes at the nonchalant conversation the two are having and feels anger flood his veins.   
He is _grieving._ Eddie is dead, and Richie is here to bring him _back_ , so he can hold him and kiss him until they’re both breathless, because that’s what Eddie _asked_ him to do. And this is what he gets instead? A god he’s never heard of who says _this is the best I can do_ like Richie won’t tear him to shreds if he doesn’t undo what his... his _brother,_ apparently, did, and the spirit of a dead kid who looks all wrong with his slicked hair and his empty eyes.   
“Can you two,” he yells, refusing to cry again, “shut the fuck up? I don’t want the original, Maturin, I want _my_ Eddie back! Shit taste in music, swears like a sailor, has an unhealthy obsession with shorts? Ring any fucking bells?”

A stunned silence reverberates in Richie’s head. 

_I give you the opportunity to speak to the real Edward Kaspbrak,  
here in a version of my worlds where you were never meant to meet in the first place—and you refuse? _

“Yes!” Richie yells, “I fucking refuse!”

_You are inseparable, in other universes. You grow up together; you call him a best friend in some, a lover in others. You get torn apart and still manage to find each other again._

“I don’t care!”

_In other universes, he dies in your arms._

“He already died in my arms!” He takes in a shuddering breath and lets fresh tears slip unbidden down his face because all efforts to keep them at bay are futile. “ _My_ Eddie died in my arms, and now I ask you to give him back to me. I don’t care if he’s not—not the original _,_ he was _real.”_   
And Richie, scared little boy he is, went and told Eddie to his face that he didn’t think him real. He’d swallow his tongue if it could help take back those words. “He was real,” he repeats, all anger leaving his body, replaced by bone-deep exhaustion. “Please, Maturin—anything, I’ll do anything.”

_Very well, then._

In the corner of Richie’s eyes, Edward’s shape fades back to black nothingness. 

_The days where I could throw up entire universes are long gone._ _  
_ _If you want you friend back, I’ll need help._

“Anything,” Richie says again, and means it with all that he is. 

☆☆☆ 

One second, Richie is surrounded by nothingness, and the next he’s hovering over the well. He opens his eyes to the see the glimmering light he noticed at the bottom grow stronger, almost blinding him—then gravity reclaims its power over him, and Richie falls to the ground. 

He only nearly avoids losing all his teeth on the edge of the well, and he’s still shaking and swearing when he manages to go back to the only version of Eddie he cares about.

“The other you dresses like a dickhead,” Richie tells him, willing himself to calm down.   
There’s light filtering from the cracks in the walls and from the small, narrow window that faces the outside, obscured by overgrown weeds—the room he’s in still looks unnaturally big and cold, but the glimpse to the outside does wonders to ground him.   
How long was he stuck in that...parallel dimension, anyway? It felt no more than ten minutes, and yet, enough time has passed that it’s morning outside of the House.   
He looks down at Eddie, lying supine on the cold floor, hoping against hope that he will simply open his eyes and complain about getting spiders in his hair. “What now?” Richie says out loud when nothing, as he knew it would, actually happens. 

_Blood_ , 

Maturin says directly inside Richie’s head.   
Richie flinches back, still unused to the feeling of not being alone inside his own skull, but recovers pretty quickly. “Blood? You want—a sacrifice?”

 _In a sense, yes. I can give your Eddie life, but I’ll need to take it from somewhere._ _  
_ _Energy, a source, to turn him into more than he was_.

Richie’s hand falls automatically on Eddie’s shoulder, as if it could be enough to shelter him from Maturin’s sight. “He doesn’t need to be _more_ , he just needs to be _alive.”_

_And alive he will be. Are you willing to give part of yourself to him?_

_More than what I already have?_ Richie thinks.   
Everything worthwhile about himself, Richie has willingly given away, desperate to have Eddie hold his heart and like it, too; and now that Eddie is gone, there’s not much left behind. Richie could live with the thought of Eddie happy somewhere far from him, could survive with his heart thousands of miles away if needed, but this? He’s as much of a shell as the doll of a boy in front of him.   
Of course, he’ll bleed for him.

 _Then it’s decided. Part of your life, for his_

Richie nods, resolute and scared and hopeful. He looks around and spots a beer bottle amongst the trash littering the floor almost everywhere—he will probably catch some incurable disease by cutting himself open with a shard of glass, but he figures that the cosmic entity he’s been conversing with can make sure that doesn’t happen. Maybe. He can hope.   
He stands up on unsteady legs and picks up the bottle, smashing it against the nearest wall hard enough to send it into pieces. There’s not much light in here, but it’s enough to find a sizeable shard among the rest, and he palms it with no care whether he’ll cut himself or not—isn’t that the point, anyway?   
Sat back next to Eds, his head between his open knees, Richie lowers the shard to his palm, unsure where else to make himself bleed. 

_Make it drip in his mouth,_

Maturing whispers in his head, sounding, if not bored, at least wholly detached from Richie and Eddie’s fate. This could work, or this could not, and Richie guesses not having Eddie back will stop the world from spinning only for him.   
“Fuck, in his mouth? He would hate that,” Richie says with a chuckle that betrays his nerves, and presses the glass down enough to cut. He hisses and curses at the pain, but he’s quick to gently click Eddie’s jaw open, and let the thin stream fall in his mouth.   
His hand is shaking; red stains the delicate shade of the porcelain. 

_This will not be enough—there’s hardly any life in that._

“Shit,” Richie swears, and squeezes his hand tighter to let more blood spill out. Maturin is right, not much is coming out—why the fuck did he slice his _palm_ open, of all places?   
“Fuck, okay, I guess—yeah, I mean, fuck it—” he mumbles, and then before some deeply ingrained survival instinct can stop him, Richie cuts his wrist.

He goes deep, perhaps too deep. Blood streams out, a red so intense it borders on black, and it pools in Eddie’s open mouth, goes spilling over in long tracks over Eddie’s painted cheeks.   
“Better?” Richie asks—to Maturin, to Eddie himself—and ignores how his vision is starting to go blurry.

_Better,_

Maturing agrees, and true to his word, _something_ starts to happen. 

The suture between Eddie’s neck and his torso starts to fade. Incredibly, the blood suddenly goes down his throat with a gurgling sound that would make Richie laugh if he wasn’t so busy trying not to pass out. He spares a glance at Eddie’s hands, before he loses his vision completely, and he sees ( _hears_!) the fingers straighten with a crack and relax again, this time no neat line to separate the knuckles. 

It’s working, it’s working! Richie’s heart thunders in his chest, pumping more blood out of his veins and into Eddie; the rays filtering in from the outside tremble and come back full force; for a split second, it looks like the midday sun is shining bright right above them before fading to black, like a lightbulb shot through with too much electricity. A high-pitched whistle fills Richie’s ears, and whether it’s a manifestation of Maturin’s power at work, or Richie’s body warning him that there’s something very wrong that needs immediate attention, Richie couldn’t say.  
Suddenly he can see better, though his vision is blurrier than ever, but this time the light comes from under Eddie’s body—or does it come _from_ Eddie?—a green luminescence that reminds Richie, in some part of his brain tucked far away from all this, of the neon sign of the Arcade at night. Drops of blood fall on the ground; flowers and blades of grass grow where they touched the cold stone. 

_Still not enough_

Richie’s brain is lagging behind. It takes a moment to decipher the words. “Still—what do you mean, I can’t—” Fuck, he’s slurring his words, he’s about to pass out. “How much more do you need?”

_Don’t sound so surprised, I warned you_

“What—You didn’t tell me I needed to slice both my wrists open! I could _die_!”   
Maturin doesn’t answer. Richie is starting to think this guy is kind of an asshole, but right now, with Eddie slowly but surely taking a more human form right under his eyes, there’s not much Richie wouldn’t endure. A cosmic entity talking down on him, severe blood loss—really, who cares? If it means he’ll get to talk to Eddie again, he’ll take it. 

He struggles to find the piece of glass he used, having probably dropped it when his free hand started losing feeling. As Richie paws at the ground looking for it, he hears distant sounds of footsteps and hurried voices, but he pays it no mind—no one ever comes to this House, and he doubts Maturin will let passer-bys notice the weird green glowing light coming from the basement.   
Strangely, instead of fading out as they would if people were walking away from Neibolt, the sounds intensify, and Richie realizes someone is already _inside_. 

Panic floods his veins to replace the lost blood. What if someone interrupts him? Would Maturin fuck off to wherever he came from, offended or bored or annoyed, and leave Eddie in some weird state between life and non-existence, with Richie bleeding out all over him?   
Frantic, he wills his vision to focus, and he manages to find the shard of glass. Muffled thuds of many pairs of feet (four? five? more?) from above distract him as Richie tries to press the shard over his other wrist with enough strength to cut; the sounds shift, and they go from over the ceiling to behind him, where he knows the entrance of the basement is.   
“Shit, _shit_ , come on,” he mutters to himself—not crying, he’s not crying! He doesn’t have enough time to cry!—but he’s fading out, fast. 

Just as he’s about to collapse, the door creaks open behind him. An arch of light falls over Eddie’s face, now as pale as a corpse’s, but _human,_ skin and bone and teeth, and then there are hands holding Richie’s upright. 

“Richie, you _idiot_ ,” is the first thing he hears, and it’s no surprise at all, actually, that Stan came all the way over here and interrupted a blood ritual just to insult him. “What are you _doing_?”   
He’s lightheaded enough that it takes a while for him to think of an answer, and as he thinks Bev, and Bill, Mike and Ben, crowd around him, all wide-eyed and sweaty, washed in a sickly green tint by the luminescence surrounding Eddie’s body.   
“Guys,” Richie finally says, his dripping wrist held stubbornly over Eddie’s mouth, “don’t look so shocked, you know today is Blood Ritual Wednesday.”   
Bev and Ben seem not to hear him at all, their entire attention stolen by the magic that’s working over Eddie, but Mike, more pragmatic by nature (much like Stan, but backed up by more life experience than him), tears part of his long sleeved shirt off and wraps it around Richie’s wound.   
“No, wait,” Richie tries to say, but he’s cut off by a sting at the pressure Mike is applying on the cut.   
“He’s about to pass out,” Mike states, and—yeah, he’s right, no arguments from Richie there. “Bill, help me out, wrap this around his arm.”

Richie lets Bill tie another strip of Mike’s shirt around his bicep, in part because he’s pretty sure Mike will tackle him to the ground if he starts fighting off first aid, and also because he feels more...lucid? More grounded? Less _I’m willing to kill myself to bring my best friend back_ and more _there’s gotta be an easier way to do this._ _  
_ _“_ We need to finish the ritual,” he explains hurriedly, unsure on how much longer Maturin will humour his request to bring Eddie back. “Blood—Maturin said he can’t create life anymore, he needed mine to give to Eddie—”   
“Maturin?” Stan asks, but Beverly shushes him with a hand over his shoulder.   
“Questions later,” she says, and turns with determined eyes to look at Richie. “I don’t know why you tried to do this alone, but it’s working. How can we help? Does Eddie need more...blood? Is that it?”   
Richie nods, and wraps his free hand around his wrist to replace Mike’s. He feels weirdly rejuvenated now that his friends are here, but he has no idea whether something esoteric is going on or if it’s simply the placebo effect of having them around. He feels better, and he’s not about to question it.   
“I have—here, I have this piece of glass, make yourself bleed somehow.” And then he’s quick to add: “Not your wrists! You’ll bleed out too, just your hands. With six of us, it should be enough to bring Eddie back.”

“I’m so tired of this weird shit happening _all the time,_ ” Stan groans, but he’s the first to take the shard of glass from Richie’s slack hand to press it to his own palm. He hisses, and red blooms out of the wound—he’s quick to direct the thin stream in Eddie’s mouth.   
The others follow suit, between quiet swears and stoic silences, and the more they all bleed, the better Richie feels, like they’re replenishing his own veins instead of filling Eddie’s fast-changing body. 

Now that he’s not on the verge of passing out, Richie can observe, wide-eyed and amazed, how quick porcelain and wood morphs into skin; how Eddie’s limbs seem to stiffen and snap into place before falling, limp but natural, back on the floor.   
“It’s working!” Ben says, squeezing his palm tighter to make more blood come out. He’s stating the obvious, but no one points it out: there are hums of agreement, and hurried _come on, come ons_ spilling from everyone’s lips that betray their impatience.   
Richie can’t blame them—the unnatural green luminescence, the ozone smell in the air that Richie’s come to recognize as a sign of Maturin’s presence, the unsettling cracks of bones shifting (growing?) in Eddie’s body...it’s not pleasant, to say the least. Stan, pale as a sheet beside him, stays for the most part silent, but Richie can hear his desire to _get the fuck away from this house_ as clear as if he had voiced it out loud.

And still, Richie is so lost in the signs of life returning to Eddie (the delicate lines of tendons on the back of his hands, the color high on his cheeks, his hair, his nose, even his fucking ears) that everything else is merely background.   
“How much more?” Beverly asks, uncertain. There are too many hands trying to fit over the same small area; they’re dripping blood over each other’s fingers, half of it misses Eddie’s mouth and goes to waste, and Richie thinks, head steady but heart pounding, _is it still not enough? Won’t it ever be—_

And then Eddie coughs. 

He coughs and he splatters blood over his shirt, and he flutters his doe eyes open to throw daggers at everyone around him. “Fucking hell, I couldn’t breathe,” he shrieks, “are you guys trying to _drown_ me?”   
Ben and Stan instinctively retract at the sudden movement, while the others are already caught in shocked, overwhelmed laughter.   
“God, that’s _disgusting,_ ” Eddie is still saying, sitting up in the middle of the circle they unthinkingly created. He opens his mouth with a grimace, and—yep, there it is, Eddie’s tongue, where he’s trying to rub the taste of his friends’ blood off with the hem of his shirt. A very human looking tongue. Wet, and very red now but probably a pretty, normal, _human_ pink underneath. 

Well, what is Richie supposed to do? He bursts into tears. 

The Losers seem to snap back to reality all at the same time. At least three of them exclaim _Eddie!_ in sync, while Ben takes one for the team and starts crying as well—which, admittedly, makes Richie feel a bit less pathetic.   
“Can someone tell me what the _fuck_ is going on?” Eddie yells, eyes saucer-wide on his pale face—skin that has yet to be touched by the sun, the freckles that Bev so carefully painted gone—and then Richie is hugging him so tight he can’t speak anymore. 

Eddie wraps his arms around Richie’s waist, and Richie leans bodily against his chest like someone unplugged him, all energy gone, and Eddie inevitably falls back on the ground with a startled _ow!_ _  
_ “Well, you were dead,” Stan explains, only a smidge of hysteria in his voice, “and now you’re. Not.”   
Richie, still laying on top of Eddie and with no intention to move for a long time, can see from the corner his eye Ben nod fervently, like Stan just offered an exhaustive recollection of the facts and he has nothing to add. It makes Richie chuckle, voice wet with tears, and he hides his face in the hollow of Eddie’s shoulder to hide his smile.   
“Thank you, Stan, now everything’s clear,” Eddie deadpans, and wow, Richie’s missed him. Richie’s _missed_ him. “Dead and not then not dead, got it. Rich, Rich—are you okay? You’re all bleeding, you’re gonna get _tetanus_.”

A startled laugh makes the round between the Losers, and Richie feels more than sees someone ruffling Eddie’s hair, and patting the arm he’s keeping tight around Richie.   
After a second in which he debates how creepy it would be to lick Eddie’s neck—he doesn’t know where the instinct comes from, although the desire to put his tongue on Eddie is nothing new—Richie props himself on his forearms, and grins at Eddie’s face peering up at him.   
“Tet- _anus,”_ he says, and watches with an overwhelming wave of affection Eddie’s lips twist in a disgusted grimace. There are still streaks of red rolling down his jaw, or smudged on his chin, but his eyes are the same as always—warm, too big, too unfairly charming. 

“We had to p-perform some sort of blood ri-ritual,” Bill adds. He looks curiously down at the palm of his hand, and his eyebrows shot up. “We’re already...healing? Suh-somehow?”  
“Fuck, you’re right,” Beverly whispers. She shows Eddie her hand, where the cut looks weeks old instead of fresh, and smiles wide, eyes watery. “We’re so happy you’re back, Eddie. And as a human, too—I don’t know what we did, but it worked!”

Eddie gasps and turns to stare up at Richie. His hands tighten around Richie’s biceps strong enough to leave bruises, and Richie loves him so much it’s unbearable. “A human?” he whispers, hesitant, hopeful, as if they’re dangling a dream in front of his eyes before snatching it away. “I’m—I’m _real_?”   
“You’ve always been real,” Richie says, and kisses him, bloody mouth and all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only the epilogue left! (There will be smut. Fucking finally.)


	14. Chapter Fourteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the subscribers: Hello! It's been a while (again). Last chapter Richie and the rest of the Losers performed a blood ritual following Maturin's instruction, and he brought Eddie back to life—this time, in an entirely human body. This chapter starts where the last one ended (a.k.a., with Richie kissing Eddie)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally it's here! Beware, it's a 12k chapter and half of it is smut—that's why it took so long to post!

_January 7th, 1994_

Richie is kissing him. 

It is, by all standards, a bad kiss. Blood still coats his teeth, so that when Richie drags his tongue against Eddie’s with a moan, Eddie doesn’t get the pleasure of tasting anything but the slick, acrid iron.  
And yet, it’s Richie’s lips on his, Richie’s shaky breath that warms his skin when he pulls back a fraction of a second before leaning in again. There are many gross things Eddie would hate if it wasn’t for Richie’s involvement (the absolute mess of his car, to mention one, or watching him let a popsicle melt down his fingers just to lick them clean later) and this kiss is no exception: Eddie becomes keenly aware of his own new-found humanity only in the places where Richie’s skin is touching him. 

It’s disconcerting. Eddie can’t get enough. 

It doesn’t last very long. 

“Uh, g-guys?” Bill says from—somewhere, who cares, Eddie is _on fire_ under Richie’s weight, everything is sharp and new and _electrifying._ It’s only when Bill adds, “I think the b-building is collapsing!” that Eddie spares the words any attention.  
“ _What?_ ” he shrieks, louder than he intended, against Richie’s lips. Then half of the ceiling on the opposite side of the room crumbles and sends wood splinters flying everywhere, and suddenly there’s no need for further explanation. 

_Your friend is right. You should leave,_

a voice whispers in Eddie’s mind, soft but resolute, and...familiar? As the words settle in his head, he pictures a turtle walking on the edge of a well, and he certainly doesn’t have the time to investigate _that—_ not when everything around him is tumbling down.   
Richie flinches back, spooked by something. “You heard that, too?” Eddie asks, and watches him as Richie goes pale and nods fervently. 

They scramble to their feet, tripping over each other four separate times, and when they’re untangled—but still touching; Richie sinks his painted nails over the fabric of Eddie’s shirt like he can’t physically let go, and Eddie responds in kind—Eddie turns around to see the others do the same.

_My brother is—_

S̸̛͇T̴̹̺̂̅̃͝A̵̻̖̲̭̓̋Y̵̨͍̜̝̓͂!̷͇͇͋ ̷̧̟̲͋̀S̸͚̖͇͒͝͝T̶͕̲͝A̶͓̟̮̝͊̆Y̶̝̅̔ ̶̢̄́͝A̶̼̫̺̲̿N̴͗̇̀̾͜D̵̛̻͑ ̴̜̐̓̽K̸̜͔̓̿E̶̺̔͒̉E̶̹̠̹͎̎P̸̐̍̒̽͜ ̸̟̘̑̔̋Ủ̸̧̲͋͌͘ͅS̶̗̣͆͐ ̴̛̪̭͎̼̾̈C̶̟͕̊̀͝Ö̷̤́M̷̰͚͎̏͗̑̋ͅP̸̦͎͕͐̚Ä̷͇̙́͛̿̏͜N̶̻̒̒Y̶̧͉̊͋!̴̤͉͒̾ ̶̧̖̏̍̽͘P̷̛̺̖͐Ĺ̴̯͔͍͎͐E̷͍̮͓̚N̵̛̼͕̘͔̄͑Ť̸͎̪̈́Y̷͈̝͈̅̓͒̕ ̶̡͓̻̓̌̒̿Ơ̶̗̗̊̕F̷͔͖̝̈́͜ ̴̺̪͖̍̋O̶̰͆̊͑̀Ṯ̴͚̦̏̅͘͠Ḧ̵͈́É̷̬͋̂R̵̨̖͔͆̋͂̀S̷̛̬̫̪̆̒ͅ ̶͔͒̉Ḩ̵̞͕̀̇̄͂ͅḚ̶̡̍̑͗̚Ŗ̴̗̪̑͛̈́̈́Ë̴͓̘̦́̌͠!̵̩̘̎

—irate. 

Eddie screams and stumbles back, crushing against Ben. “And what the fuck was _that_?”  
Ben keeps him steady and starts pushing him in the direction of the door, that Mike and Bev repeatedly kick until it swings open. _Whatever It is_ , Eddie thinks, _It has an unhealthy obsession with locking people in rooms_.

“What was what?” Ben asks.  
“The—the voice, it sounded,” Eddie tries to explain, but the alarmed look on Richie’s face, now tugging him just as Ben is pushing, tells him they’re the only two with foreign voices echoing in their heads.  
“That’s the fucking clown!” Richie yells, nonsensical for everyone but Eddie, who only now remembers how he died in the first place. 

Bowers, the voice that came out of his grinning mouth, how Eddie was sure that there was something else inside the boy...It had sounded clean and sharp, then, but the jovial tone that betrayed unbidden rage was the same. It is here. It wants to kill them.

Mike is screaming _go, go, go,_ and Eddie is going, going, going—at first, still not used to his brand new _human_ legs, he lags behind as the others sprint up the stairs to the ground floor (they were in a basement? _why?),_ and Richie turns around to give him a truly terrified look when he doesn’t find Eddie right by his side.  
“I’m fine, I’m okay!” he yells over the rumble of what seems to be an aggressive and Neibolt-specific earthquake shaking the house.  
Stan is clawed on Richie’s arm, trying to tug him away from the crumbling basement, and with his free hand he gestures wildly at Eddie to get a move on. “Are you guys hearing _voices_ now?”  
“It’s _It_ , Stan, It’s pissed that Eddie is—” Richie tries to say, but the rotting wood collapses under his feet, and it’s only because Stan already had a death grip on him that Richie doesn’t fall under the dark foundations of the house. 

He’s not hurt, Eddie can see it clearly when he gets his footing back, and yet a spike of something goes through his new system—adrenaline, maybe, or pure gut-wrenching horror at the thought of Richie getting buried under the building’s weight—and it’s the shock he needed to sprint for real.  
His knees become so fluid all of a sudden, and in the moment he feels more like a well-oiled machine than when he was brass and metal.  
It screeches something else in his head, and it’s loud but so distorted that it barely counts as words.  
“Shut the fuck up, God, _leave us alone!”_ Eddie groans as he jumps over the missing part of the stairs. He doubts It will listen, but the act itself of pushing air out of his lungs feels good, the burn in his throat makes him feel alive.  
“Yeah, what he said!” Richie yells, and Eddie grabs his sweaty palm as he reaches him, and Richie squeezes so tight the dull ache in his fingers will last for hours, and Stan doesn’t intrude in the moment as much as he drives a wrecking ball through it by shouting, “Very cute, guys, _but we’re about to fucking die_.”

And so they run. 

Eddie runs so fast, actually, dodging broken furniture and flying pieces of drywall, that he’s the first to stumble out of the main door. His lungs, or what he thinks are his lungs, are on fire by the time he’s outside under the morning sun—his hands are shaking, he feels a new surge of adrenaline in what _must_ be his bloodstream. Blood, hot, red, flowing in his veins; a heart in his chest to pump it everywhere in his body, _tu-tum tu-tum tu-tum_ , he can _hear it,_ it’s _his_. 

This momentous realization happens in the span of a second, then his worry about having left his friends behind overwhelms him. He didn’t even notice when he let go of Richie’s hand.  
Eddie turns to face the front door, a weird pain in the depths of his stomach, but the fear is short-lived. Richie appears only moments later, and Beverly hot on his heels with Ben by her side (she, laughing wildly, Ben, wide-eyed and red-faced); Mike, Bill, and Stan squeeze through the door at the same time, just as the roof gives out under its own weight.  
They have to sprint again to the middle of the street to avoid the flying debris, and when they’re at a safe distance they all watch the building they were just in practically disappear in a pile of dust and rotten wood. 

“Cool,” Beverly says, nodding solemnly.  
Richie sucks in a shaky breath. “What the _fuck_ , Maturin!” he yells at the top of his lungs—then he tries to kick a piece of wood that landed near his feet, misses, and groans loudly at the sky.  
Eddie laughs at him, breathless, but it dies quickly as he starts to experience what he will learn later be the crush after the adrenaline high.  
“I think I’m gonna,” he says, and folds to the ground like a puppet with its string cut off—a metaphor that pops in his mind as his knees touch the ground, and that revives his laugh for a short while.  
Everyone starts fussing around him. He thinks Ben is fully ready to pick him up and give Eddie a piggyback ride to the nearest hospital, but it’s Richie who looks the most devastated when he sees Eddie go down like a house of cards. “I’m fine! Everyone just chill out, fuck, I’m _good_ ,” he rushes to say. “I’m—so fucking tired, though. Like what the hell just happened? What was _that_?” he adds, and gestures fervently at the destroyed house.  
“Ask Richie. He’s the only one who knows the details,” Mike says. His shirt is shredded in different places, and the grey dust sticks to his abdomen and arms where the skin is left uncovered—Eddie refuses to add that to the ever growing list of things that need an explanation. Let Mike go around naked if he wants, he’s past caring. 

“Y-yeah, we o-only found you cause I came by to check on you early this morning, and your d-dad said you weren’t home.” Bill passes a hand through his straight hair, and a cloud of dust falls out. “Had to t-t-tell him you were at Stan’s and I just f-forgot about it.”  
“We looked for you everywhere, Richie,” Ben adds, “we barely made it here on time. You almost—your wrist, you lost so much blood—” 

Richie drops his forehead on Eddie’s shoulder with an exhausted groan. “Don’t worry, Haystack, I’m good, really. I’ll tell you guys everything, I promise. But, can we just—tomorrow? Tomorrow.” 

No one objects to the barely-coherent request. Beverly, who reassures them she’s still too wired from the stress of performing a blood ritual and running out of a collapsing building to fall asleep at the wheel, offers to drive Mike’s truck for him.  
It’s parked not far from the House, but Eddie notices it only when the others start to tiredly drag their feet to it. They throw Richie’s bike in the back, where Bill and Ben volunteer to stay for the ride, and Eddie squeezes himself on the backseat between Richie and Stan.  
“You okay, Spaghetti?” Richie whispers at some point, speaking so softly it almost doesn’t wake Eddie from the torpor he’s falling in.  
Eddie hums and leans on him some more, his nose in the hollow of Richie’s neck to seek out his warmth. He wants to kiss him again, but he’s so tired. Eddie’s never known tiredness like this. 

He mumbles something that’s supposed to sound like _yeah, shut the fuck up, let me sleep._ Richie, indeed, shuts the fuck up, but not before pinching Eddie’s cheek between a grimy thumb and forefinger. 

☆☆☆ 

Richie’s house is blissfully empty when Bev drops them off. 

Eddie got squeezed in a Loser group hug before they’d let him go that might have done damage to his new ribs, but he’d liked it anyway. He has no recollection of where his...subconscious, _soul_ , whatever, went after It destroyed him—if it ended up anywhere at all—but he’s aware of a coldness that emanates from his very bones, slowly dissipating in the presence of his friends. It melts away a bit more whenever he turns to see one of them already staring back at him; a relieved smile on their faces, a sheen of tears coating their eyes. Like Eddie’s absence had knocked the world off the right axis, and now that he’s back, the ground is finally steady under their feet. 

He’d have appreciated the hug more if he wasn’t so incredibly exhausted. Richie seemed perplexed that his parents weren’t home when he sneaked Eddie in through the backdoor—but Eddie had barely noticed, and cared even less, as he let himself be half-carried, half-pushed upstairs, practically already in the middle of a nap. 

The sight of Richie’s bed was heavenly, and the feeling of his pillow under Eddie’s head even more, and he fell deep asleep in seconds. Somewhere in the newfound, animal part of him, his subconscious registered the feeling of hands slipping off his penny loafers. They never got around to buying a new pair for him; he’s been wearing the same shoes for roughly sixty years now. It’s a weird last realization to have before he’s ( _figuratively_ , this time) dead to the world for good. 

He doesn’t dream. Brand new brain; it’ll need a while to catch onto the intricacies of processing thoughts and imagery had during the day.  
He drifts slowly back to consciousness hours later, and when he flutters his eyes open he finds Richie only in boxers and a long-sleeved shirt on the other side of the room.  
It’s not the worst sight to wake up to. Richie’s back to him, and there’s a pair of sweatpants dangling from one hand, stuck mid-air, that suggests he was getting dressed before he got distracted by something.  
“No fucking way,” he mumbles and drops the pants to the floor. 

Eddie silently slips out of the bed, feeling if not well-rested, then decently so, and walks up to Richie. It’s a testament to how engrossed he is in whatever he found on his dresser that Richie doesn’t notice him until he spins around and finds Eddie right behind him.  
“Eddie, wa—holy shit!” he yelps, and stumbles back in his surprise. “Why were you lurking around, you weirdo? You scared the shit out of me.”  
Richie’s hair is damp; it limps heavy over the legs of his glasses like the floppy ears of a particularly tall poodle. Eddie raises up on his tiptoes and kisses him softly on the lips.  
“Oh,” Richie murmurs, “yeah, okay.” He’s suddenly pliant and docile under Eddie’s hands, and it makes Eddie giggle, how easy it was. 

Richie presses closer and slots their lips together as Eddie is still laughing. It catches him by surprise, halfway through a gasp, and their tongues meet, wet and hot, and the way Richie curls his around Eddie’s makes him melt against his chest.  
It’s only then, when he hears paper crinkle between their bodies, that Eddie licks one last time at Richie’s full bottom lip and looks down. Held in Richie’s hands, he finds a small stack of papers stapled together and a separate, heavier looking one, that bears a gold stamp and a flowy signature on the bottom. 

“Fuck, right, I found these sitting on my desk,” Richie says and clears his throat. He shifts so he’s shoulder to shoulder with Eddie instead of leaning over him to be kissed. “It looks like—well, fuck if I know how, Eds, but it looks like you’re officially a Real Boy. As in, you’re in some government database somewhere.”  
“The hell is a database?” Eddie mutters, not really paying attention, and steals the thicker sheet of paper right of Richie’s hands. 

It’s a high school diploma. Eddie’s never seen one before, but the text on top reads Bangor High School Diploma, so there’s not much room left for doubt there—and underneath, his name. The name he took from the original Edward Kaspbrak, at least.  
He rubs the pad on his thumb over the superintendent’s signature at the bottom, and again on the smaller one of the president’s ( _which_ president?) in the lower corner: they look real. Eddie has spent only a couple of hours in a high school, and for most of the time he was stuck in a broom closet, terrified that Richie was dying on the other side of the door—and you know what? Just for that, he _deserves_ this diploma. 

Richie keeps talking as Eddie carefully lowers the diploma back on his cluttered desk. “There’s fucking everything in here, man!” he exclaims, incredulous, waving around his free hand, the other one busy holding the documents close to his face, “Birth certificate, social security card...I don’t know what _this_ one is, but it looks important.” He suddenly gasps, and when his face emerges from the mess of different papers and envelopes all stapled together, he’s wearing the biggest enthusiastic-puppy-dog smile Eddie has ever seen. “Your official date of birth is the 27 of July, _1975_. You’re already eighteen! Forget Real Boy, you’re a Real Man!”  
Eddie’s face splits in a smile to rival Richie’s own. “I’m a _man_?” he repeats, and Richie laughs at his awe-struck tone but also rushes closer to wrap him in a bear hug.  
“You’re a man!” he yells in Eddie’s ear, and Eddie is so swept away but Richie’s joy that he can’t even pretend to be annoyed. Relief pools warm and heavy in his stomach, spreads to his limbs until he’s almost shaking with it—the bad part is truly, definitely over. He is free to just _live_ , now.

“Oh, wait,” Richie says. Eddie remains clinging to his body like a determined octopus. “I think I saw…”—rustling of paper, Richie’s arms moving behind Eddie’s back without ending the hug, “Yes, there you go, there’s a note from the turtle, the myth, the legend himself.”  
Eddie leans back, and Richie lowers the small rectangle right in front of his eyes. 

_One last parting gift. Again, sorry about all the trouble._

_-Maturin_

_p.s. We’re going back to sleep. It’ll be a long time before my brother bothers anyone again. Enjoy your fleeting decades of life, kids_

“Parting gift,” Eddie reads out loud, “honestly, at this point, he’s just showing off.”  
Richie chuckles and extricates himself out of Eddie’s arms only long enough to chuck all the documents plus Maturin’s small card on the desk. “Yeah, guy’s kind of a dick.”  
“Can you _not_ offend the immortal deity that brought me back to life? Thanks.”

Richie snorts. “Sorry, immortal deity that brought Eddie back to life,” he says to the ceiling, Voice high to mimic a petulant child—it comes to him way too easily, if you ask him. He drops his gaze back to Eddie, eyes warm behind the thick frames of his glasses, and he cups Eddie’s face in his two big palms. “Now, where were we?” he says, and then they’re kissing again. 

☆☆☆ 

Richie drags his hands down Eddie’s neck, to the slope of his shoulders, lower still to follow the line of his spine. 

Months of pining, weeks of misery, one _very_ busy day, and finally he gets to do this. The reality of it has yet to sink in; Richie’s clinging to every passing moment like he’s afraid they will turn to dust if he takes them for granted.  
Eddie’s skin is smooth and warm under his hands, and when he digs his fingers in he can feel the muscles shift underneath—he pushes his palms further up the expanse of his back, and Eddie’s shirt bunches around his wrists in folds of fabric that restrict his movements.  
Eddie breaks off the kiss with a breathless gasp. “Wait, let me—” he says, and slips from Richie’s hold to take the shirt off.  
Richie would be content to just stand there in front of Eddie and watch his naked torso for a while, but he barely gets a peek before Eddie is plastered on his front again, mouth hot on Richie’s jaw. 

Eddie licks a strip down his neck and bites down with a self-satisfied moan. “Eds, _you_ ,” Richie thinks to inform him, because it seems like the polite thing to do, “are killing me.”  
Eddie leans back to frown at him, a red flush high on his cheeks, and his eyes are big and bright under those thick brows of his. “Oh, shut up, I don’t even know what I’m doing.”  
Richie has never been this hard in his _entire life_. “I beg to differ,” he says, cops a feel of Eddie’s ass now that he’s distracted.  
Eddie yelps and raises on his tiptoes to escape Richie’s hands—which makes Richie feel like a gross pervert, for a moment, like he passed an unspoken line, made Eddie regret this before it even began—but then he presses back into his palms, and the vice squeezing Richie’s heart relents. Eddie even bites his lip when Richie squeezes, holds eye contact with him, which should be illegal if your eyes look like _that,_ and Richie is _losing his mind._  
“Rich, I need”—he sinks his hands in Richie’s hair, and tugs him down to kiss him, but they end up simply breathing in each other’s air when Richie slips a thigh between his and grinds down—”I need, something, I don’t...Just touch me, anything, please.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” he says, but for a moment he has no idea what to do. How many times has he imagined this? Is he sure this isn’t just a particularly vivid dream? Then again, even in the privacy of his head, he’s rarely let himself have this: Eddie asking to be touched, begging even, trembling with the same desperation that Richie is so intimately familiar with. 

But it _is_ real, too much horror preceded this moment for it to be just a good dream. He wraps his arms tight around Eddie, kisses the corner of his mouth because he can, because he’s _allowed_ —and, well. If Eddie is asking to feel good then there’s one thing in particular Richie’s imagined doing times and times again, mostly when it was the least appropriate. 

He keeps his hands loose on Eddie’s hips and drops to his knees.

Eddie looks down at him, nose scrunched in confusion. “Uh, hello? The fuck are you doing on the floor?”  
Richie is at eye level with Eddie’s dick and, behind the buttons of his heavy shorts, he’s visibly hard. That’s an irrefutable fact. This is where Life has brought Richie to: at eye level with Eddie’s dick, and already drooling at the prospect of getting him in his mouth. _Thank you_ so _much, Life._

“Never heard of a blowjob, dipshit?” he asks, and then he has to snap his mouth shut because just saying the word out loud is making his dick throb in his pants. He realizes in that moment that the risk of him coming the second he puts his tongue on Eddie is _very high._

Eddie flicks Richie’s ear, and at least the sting of it distracts Richie from his musings. “I actually haven’t, thanks for asking,” he retorts. “I don’t see how blowing on my...my _dick_ is the same thing as _touching me_ , though.”  
Richie snorts and leans back on his haunches to ride out his laugh. Eddie makes an indignant noise above him, and keeps on talking: “What! What’s so fucking funny, now! You said _blowj_ ob, is that not—? And by the way, no one told me having an erection _hurts_ , I feel like someone should have given me that memo. I’ve never hated a pair of fucking pants more than now, stupid...fucking _buttons...stop laughing!”_ _  
_“Oh my God, dude,” Richie manages to wheeze out, utterly charmed, completely enamoured, “I’m gonna suck you off, I’m not just gonna—” He mimics blowing on a birthday candle. “—on your dick until something happens, you freak.”

That seems to stop Eddie dead in his tracks. “ _Oh_. You would do that? For me?”  
Richie almost laughs at that, but he’s quickly overwhelmed by a wave of affection that makes his hands tremble. “There’s not much I wouldn’t do for you,” he says, and feels his eyes gloss over with tears, “now stop yelling, and let me take off your pants."

Richie brings his hands back the waistband of Eddie's shorts, but Eddie jolts back.  
"Wait, stop!" he screeches. "No fucking way you'll be the first one to see inside my pants," he explains, thankfully before Richie can spiral into a second wave of unnecessary self-hate.  
“Jesus, Eds, don’t do that to me, I’m _fragile_.” Seeing that moment of tenderness has been ruined anyway, he takes the opportunity to antagonize Eddie some more. "Don’t shut me out. We can look at it together! That's romantic!"  
Eddie slaps his wandering hand away and, still giggling, makes a show of unbuttoning his shorts and shielding the view from Richie as he looks inside. 

A shocked expression paints itself on Eddie's face, startling Richie into another laugh he doesn’t bother trying to suppress. The way his cheeks go pale and then immediately fiery red is an intriguing phenomenon to witness, and for reasons that Richie can't explain, it makes him want to touch Eddie even more, everywhere he'd let him.  
"Like what you see?" Richie slurs, going for a douchey playboy voice but not quite getting there. He's hard, and laughing, and very much in love—not the best headspace to whip out new impressions.  
Eddie hums, and looks back at him. "I—I think it looks fine? Healthy."  
"Healthy?"  
"Yeah, healthy."  
Richie fakes a moan. "God, that's so sexy, baby, show me that _healthy_ dick."

"You're disgusting," Eddie bites out, but this time doesn't complain when Richie starts pawing at his shorts. He gets them halfway down his thigh, and only then remembers that Eddie isn't actually wearing any underwear. And why would he? These are the clothes the Losers put on him when they were done fixing him the second time around, and he was still smooth as a doll down there at the time (Richie’s very happy to see that changed). It's not like Eddie had time to change into something more comfortable after he was brought back to life with a blood ritual and had a house almost fall on him.

So he's a bit shocked when he raises his eyes and Eddie is suddenly naked in front of him. 

He can feel his body temperature raise a notch just by looking at Eddie's, indeed healthy-looking, dick. Oh God, this is the first time Richie has seen another man's dick in his life, and it's _Eddie’s_ , who Richie likes, like _like-likes_ , and it's hard and pink and already leaking precum at the tip—and if he doesn't find out what it feels weighing on his tongue in the next three seconds he will _die_. 

"Uh, Rich?" Eddie says, sounding a mix between worried and amused. "That's what it's supposed to look like, right? Because I only saw a couple of drawings in one of your science textbooks once, and that's my only frame of reference, so I don't know if— _oh_. Oh fuck."

Richie hums in agreement, and licks again at the tip. The taste of precum is foreign, but not unwelcome, and he raises a shaking hand to hold Eddie at the base as he goes in for more.  
He truly has no idea what he's doing—what would make Eddie feel the best—but Richie has always had a very active imagination, and he's thought about what a blowjob is supposed to feel like many a-times, so he can at least guess. And the truth is, no matter what he does, he'll probably end up enjoying this more than Eddie himself—his prediction about being close to coming just by taking Eddie in his mouth proves itself correct. Richie has to use his free hand to press on his erection, in a desperate attempt to give himself some friction and stifle his arousal. He swirls his tongue around the tip again, and Eddie moans, a small sound that’s punched out of him, and then he's gripping Richie's hair hard enough to sting. 

"Fuck, oh my God, ohshitRichie _fuck_ ," he says all in one breath, sending shivers down Richie's back that seem to last forever. "Holy shit, _this_ is what it feels like?"

Oh, this is all getting to Richie's head. The thought that he's making Eddie feel good with so little—this is hardly an inconvenience for him, and he hasn't done practically anything yet apart from kitten-licking up and down his shaft as he tries to think where the fuck to go from here—and it's a heady feeling, knowing he's on his knees with a cock in his mouth, and it feels great, doesn't it? It feels amazing, the slight sting of humiliation of being the one on his knees and still be drooling for it, close to begging for it if Eddie thinks to stop him. Richie suddenly remembers _Richie Tozier sux flamer cock_ graffitied on a bathroom stall—how he bit his tongue and cried in silence as he tried to scrape it away, how he thought _I haven’t even held a boy’s hand yet_. Doing this for Eddie and enjoying every second of it is his best act of defiance. 

He looks up at Eddie, and finds him already staring back at him with eyes bright and watery with pleasure. The view sends another jolt of want to his stomach, and Richie slides his mouth lower, takes more of Eddie in his mouth. He tries to move his tongue, but his lips are stretched wide around Eddie's length, and he doesn't want to accidentally bite down—wouldn't that put a damper on things?—so he hollows his cheeks, and sucks as best as he can.

"Oh fu- _uh_ -ck," Eddie moans, looking like a whole mess ( _I did that_ , Richie thinks, _I did that!_ ) and thrusts his hips forward in Richie's mouth.

Richie, who was not expecting it, coughs and pulls off with a sputter. "Shit, Eds, warn a guy," he laughs, and the way his voice has gone all rough and deep makes the words die in his mouth. He's never sounded like this. _It's because you had a cock halfway down your throat_ , a voice inside Richie's head provides, and wow, yep, this is awakening something in him. This is a pivotal moment in his life. 

"Fuck, Richie, I'm sorry," Eddie says, all shaky and turned on and perfect, "I didn't mean to, it just felt really good."

Richie grins and takes Eddie's cock in his hand. He's soaked with saliva, and leaking precum everywhere, so it's a smooth glide. "Yeah? You can, uh.” He feels himself go even hotter in the face. “You can do that, if you want. Fuck my face.”  
Eddie makes a strangled sound that Richie categorizes as a scandalized moan. “Jesus. Thank you, I guess?”  
“Oh, he turned polite all of a sudden,” Richie comments and takes Eddie back in his mouth. For a moment it’s not the easiest task, because he’s still smiling and again, _teeth_ , but the second he laps up a drop of precum the unfamiliar, masculine taste of it goes straight to his head, and then it’s much easier.  
Richie doesn’t have, truth to be told, much more experience with dicks than Eddie himself—for years now he’s been looking straight at the floor everytime boys change around him for PE class (God forbid he gives them another excuse to avoid him like the plague, lest they _catch the gay_ from him or something), and taking a peek at stolen Playgirl magazine hardly counts as experience. What he knows is that Eddie’s is only slightly shorter than his, and it fits perfectly in his mouth when he slid down enough to bury his nose in Eddie’s curls.  
Richie almost can’t hear him over the ringing of blood in his ears—probably rushing down to his cock at the speed of light—but Eddie is blubbering above him. “Rich, I can’t fucking believe—what the fuck? Feels so good, holy shit—” 

Richie hums in agreement. There are tears filling his eyes, and for the first time in weeks they don’t come from overwhelming sadness—it’s Eddie’s length filling his mouth, stretching his lips wide, grazing his throat. He can feel himself gag slightly whenever he goes too deep, and the air is filled with the obscene wet sounds of his lips bobbing up and down Eddie’s length. Richie goes as low as he can and swallows twice around the tip, one hand squeezing Eddie’s naked thigh to ground himself, the other now fully rubbing against the crotch of his own boxers. Eddie curls around him some more, and Richie feels him everywhere—inside, all around him, Eddie’s fingers clutched tight at the back of his neck to hold on and his toned stomach brushing Richie’s forehead.  
“Richie,” Eddie brokenly gets out, sounding pained. His knees are very obviously shaking; Richie thinks _oh,_ _he’s about to come_ and the words struck him like lighting. “Rich, I don’t know what—”

Richie squeezes his eyes shut, and the tears stream down his cheeks. He would love nothing more in the entire universe than to have Eddie come straight down his throat, keep his head still as he chases his orgasm, fucking his willing mouth until Richie’s fully crying with the need to breath—but he doesn’t think he can take it. _Maybe not today_ , he reasons with himself, _but soon._ He’ll get there one day. 

Richie sucks hard on the head one last time. A string of saliva stretches between them when he finally pulls off, and it snaps and falls on the mess that is Richie’s chin—he hadn’t realized he’s drooled so much, it even dripped on the floor. When he looks down, he can’t tell if the dark stain on his underwear is from his saliva or if he’s leaked through the fabric.  
“Rich?” Eddie says, and pets a hand through Richie’s still damp hair. “You okay? Did I hurt you?”  
Richie wraps a hand around Eddie’s cock again and starts stroking him in earnest. He keeps his eyes trained on Eddie’s face, and watches as he goes slack-mouthed and starts rocking back and forth to fuck through Richie’s fist.  
“Yeah, no, I’m fine, ‘t’s okay” Richie croaks, voice barely a whisper. He struggles with the elastic waistband of his boxers, unwilling to look down for even a second, but when he manages to push his hand inside he loses no time in gripping his aching cock. “You gonna come, Eds? Fuck, shit, I’m so close too—”

Eddie makes a confused sound. “Come? Where do I have to come?”  
Richie’s toes curl in his socks, and he barely bites back a whine. “Wherever you want, my face, I don’t care.”  
“What the fuck are you talking abo—” Eddie tries to ask, but he gets interrupted by a loud, surprised moan, and a moment later Richie has cum dripping from his glasses and a lapful of Eddie, breathing heavily against his chest.  
“Oh,” he murmurs sweetly in Richie’s ear, “I get it now,” and trembles when Richie keeps stroking his oversensitive cock. Richie feels his teeth bite sharply on his neck, and he raises both hands in surrender with a flinch.  
“Ouch, okay, _easy,_ ” he relents, and the teeth turn into a soft tongue lapping up the skin just bitten. 

Eddie leans back, only enough to show his flushed face to Richie. _He looks different_ , Richie realizes suddenly, staring into Eddie’s ridiculous bushbaby eyes, _he looks older._ The proportions of his face are different, more mature—it might be because he’s used to seeing very evident doll features in the curve of Eddie’s nose, the cut of his jawline, but now Richie would go as far as to say that Eddie could buy beer, with a good enough fake ID.  
“Uoh,” Richie breaths out, shocked by the epiphany. “Damn, you’re so fucking hot.”

A smile opens on Eddie’s face, and he looks sweetly at Richie from under his lashes when he says, “You, too. But that”—he taps on a clean spot on the glasses’ lenses—”looks so fucking gross, Rich.”  
“It’s your cum, dude!” Richie laughs, “You think it’s gross? I’ll show you gross.” And before Eddie can decipher his intentions, he grabs the side of Eddie’s face and rubs his cheeks and glasses everywhere he can on it.  
Eddie screeches right in his ear and kicks his stupid, pretty legs everywhere until he and Richie both are splayed on the floor in a mess of tangled limbs.  
“You’re such a dickhead! Lick it off, lick it off,” Eddie threatens, but he’s laughing as much as Richie. He shifts his weight further up Richie’s thighs, and it’s when the curve of his ass presses over his erection that Richie’s reminded how painfully hard he still is.  
“Guh,” he says eloquently, laughter dying in his throat. He can scarcely believe how good it feels to have Eddie’s solid weight over him, the warmth of his skin seeping through the fabric of Richie’s ruined boxers—he’s imagined this too many times to count. None of his fantasies can compare. 

The lenses of his glasses are smudged behind repair, and he suspects they’re fogged up like it only happens to _I-just-got-kissed-by-a-hot-lady_ cartoon characters, so he feels more than sees Eddie shift his legs and kick his shoes off.  
“Unbelievable,” Eddie says, huffing in frustration as he struggles to get his long socks off. He flings one off, and it lands squarely on Richie’s face—and hey, what’s one more kink to develop today? He already figured out he’s got an oral fixation, might as well associate socks with (possibly) losing his virginity for the rest of his life. He picks it up gratefully, and gets on to cleaning his face and glasses.  
“You let me do that on your face? Shit’s fucking gross. Hey—hey, Richie. Can we do that again?”  
Richie sputters, and lets the soiled sock fall on the floor. Desperately, he grabs Eddie’s hips, and holds on as he starts undulating over him like a sexy...pendulum. He can’t think of a better metaphor with the shape of Eddie’s bare hip bones digging in his palms. “You fucking—you wanna go _again_?”  
“Shut the fuck up, Richie. I’ve wanted to do this since I found out what sex was.”  
“Join the club, baby. So you thought of doin—oh, actually, yeah, you’ve mentioned it.”  
“What? No, I didn’t.”  
“You did in the letter.”  
“You—Richie. You _read_ that?”  
“Hell yeah, I did!”

Eddie groans, and in his haste to cover his face he ends up basically slapping himself—cute, cute, _cute!_ “You don’t understand!,” he moans, voice muffled, “I have to kill you now!”  
Richie bites back a laugh and pats a hand on Eddie’s naked thigh to show support. And also to cop a feel. “Listen, it’s not like I could help it. I tried to activate you with the code you taught me, and you started writing a whole fucking letter. It was like, mechanical muscle memory or something.”  
“Oh no, that’s so embarrassing, please remove that from your brain.”  
“Eddie, stop. It was adorable,” Richie reassures him. “I cried like a fucking baby, alright? You said you’re in love with me.”

Eddie lets his hands fall back on Richie’s torso. There’s a small smile on his lips, which he fails to hide, no matter how much he furrows his brows. “Of course I am, dumbass. I was angry, but I still loved you. You believe me now, right?”

Richie’s old fears flare up in his chest—that no one could feel for him what he knows he can feel for them (that one goes back years and years, it was there before Eddie came along); a more recent one, that creeped its way in later on: fear that if someone ever _would_ want him, it’d be because Richie tricked them into it. 

But last time he made excuses for Eddie’s feelings, Eddie ended up dying. The Losers have told him time and time again that it wasn’t his fault, but it’s a guilt he’ll carry within a broken space in himself for as long as he lives. 

He swallows down his anxiety. It’s _so_ not the fucking moment. “I—yeah. I think? It’s gonna take a while to sink in. But, I...I’m in love with you, too. No shit, I’m in love with you, too.”  
Eddie’s dark eyes bore into his. “Please never stop.”  
Richie’s stomach seizes up immediately at the plea, because _holy shit_ , how could he ever _stop_ loving Eddie?If the feeling fades, Richie will fade away with it. “Oh. Oh, Eddie, come on, don’t—you’re gonna make me cry while I have a boner, Jesus Christ.”  
“Like it’s hard to make you cry. Didn’t I say your face is punchable, in the letter? And mentioned that I wanted you to fuck me like three separate times? And you fucking cried.”  
Richie gladly takes the shift in mood—he’d like to get his dick touched somewhere in the near future, and they’ll get nowhere if Richie is too busy waxing poetic about Eddie in his head.  
“Yeah,” he says, “but that’s because I remembered you were smooth down there and the mental image brought tears to my eyes. Fucking creepy, man. What did you want me to do?”  
Eddie sputters, clearly offended. Did Richie hit a nerve with that joke? Possibly. “I! I don’t know!”  
“Rub my dick on you? I would have—” He’s interrupted by a delighted giggle. “I would have developed a fetish for Ken dolls, oh my _God_.”  
“Shut up!” Eddie hits him none-too gently on the chest and wiggles his hips on Richie’s. “Oh, and fucking _look_ , you’re not hard anymore. I didn’t even see your dick! I wanted to get fucked, Richie.”

Wait. _Uh?_ Richie swears he he hears a record scratch at Eddie’s words. “Are you serious? We don’t hav—”  
“F-u-c-k-e-d, Richie, so then I can tell Beverly all about it.”  
“Oh. Oh, well, if it’s for Beverly’s entertainment, then I guess we have to.”

That’s all the encouragement Eddie needs, because Richie’s still halfway through the sentence when Eddie lays down on him, his hands on either side of Richie’s face. It forces him into a sort of pout, and Eddie kisses his pursed lips with the sort of manic need Richie wouldn’t have dared hope for in his wildest fantasy. Arousal had never truly left him even as they talked, and it fires up again at the barest hint of tongue on Eddie’s part—Richie can't fucking believe he wants to make out after Richie sucked him off. Actually, hold on, he cannot believe Eddie wants to have sex. Holy shit!  
The speed at which his dick gets hard again, as if it was only waiting for Richie’s brain to catch up and get this party started, makes his head spin. 

“Hold on,” he tries to say, and immediately gets lost in the sensation of Eddie’s naked thighs squeezing around his hips. Eddie must have heard him, though, because he moans a little frustrated sound that sparks in Richie the desire to roll them over and keep him pinned down until he does it again. Eddie pulls back, instead, and frowns down at him.  
“What now?” he asks. His lips are bitten red and shiny like Snow White’s apple. Where did that metaphor come from? Oh God, Richie is losing his _mind_.  
“I don’t know, Bright Eyes, why don’t you tell me?” he sputters, scared that he’ll simply pass out if he doesn’t speak fast enough. “You were dead this morning, then a house fell on you, then suddenly I was sucking on your new, pretty cock—which, by the way, religious fucking experience, I’m a changed man.”  
Eddie pushes himself up, his hands splayed wide on Richie’s chest, his short nails rhythmically scratching the fabric of his shirt. “Nice recap. Do you also have a point?”  
“Well! Well, the point is, are you sure you’re okay? You want me to—you wanna go _all the way_?”  
“I’m _so_ okay,” Eddie says, emphatically. He’s looking down at Richie with the wildest expression Richie has had the honor of witnessing being directed at him, and he looks like he wants to eat him alive. He also seems a little...overwhelmed. To put it mildly. “I feel—alive, and also fucking _insane_ ,” Eddie explains, confirming Richie’s theory. “No, seriously, I’m good, I just didn’t think...is it always like this? Exhausting, but incredible at the same time?”  
Richie huffed a laugh. “You mean having an orgasm?”  
“Being human. Also yeah, the orgasm thing, that was crazy. I wanna do it again. Bev said something about fingering?”  
“Fingering?”  
“Yeah, that’s what she called it, keep up. Said Ben got really good at it.”  
“You gotta stop bringing our friends into this conversation, buddy.”  
“Don’t call me buddy when I’m naked on top of you. You’re getting off topic—can you finger me? I wanna know what that’s like. And then I’ll do it to you….? If you want? That’s how this works, right?”

Richie takes in a deep, calming breath and looks up at the popcorn ceiling of his room searching for a strength he doesn’t possess. He is _so_ unbelievably hard, it feels like he’s gonna die. “I—Oh God, this is so much.”  
“You wanna stop?”  
“No!”  
Eddie hums, teasing. “Take a nap, maybe?”  
“Fuck off, no!” Richie laughs and flips him off with both hands. “You’re just saying all these crazy things I’ve barely ever even thought about, you sex maniac, my brain is melting off. You’re not the only virgin here!”  
“I could do to you what you did to me,” Eddie proposes. His voice is a mix of shyness and barely repressed need that goes straight to Richie’s dick. “With—my mouth, I’d like that. It looked like you were having, like, _way_ too much fun. With less getting disgusting bodily fluids on my face, though, if possible.”

Richie has a brief but vivid mental image of Eddie swallowing him down, pink tongue kitten licking the head of his cock whenever he pulls up for breath. He groans, and lets his head thunk back on the cool floor. "Whatever you want, Eds,” he whispers, feeling flayed open and raw, his dick throbbing under the curve of Eddie’s ass.  
Eddie leans down until their chests are pressed together—Richie’s expecting a kiss; what he gets instead are teeth biting on the soft skin of his neck and Eddie’s voice in his ear. “Whatever I want?” he breathes out, an edge of desperation barely concealed. Richie wraps his arms around his ribs and hugs him closer. “I want to do everything. I want to know what having you inside me feels like.”  
Richie giggles, unbelieving. “Wow, these new hormones are driving you crazy.”  
“ _You_ ’re driving me crazy.” Eddie gently touches his forehead to his—Richie feels himself get lost in his eyes. They’re warm, limpid pools, even without the reflective glass look they had before. He’s so busy letting Eddie stare directly into his soul, that he barely notices when Eddie takes one of his hands and guides it down between their bodies. Eddie wraps it around his own cock, and Richie gasps when he realizes he’s getting hard again. 

He tightens his fingers around the length, and Eddie’s eyes roll back in his head.  
It’s like a shot of adrenaline straight to his brain. Whatever lull he’d fallen in, where having Eddie’s weight draped over him as they talked was enough, Richie suddenly can’t take it anymore.  
“Yeah, fuck, Eddie, _yes_ ,” he agrees, frantic, and takes his hand off Eddie to grasp his hips. Without warning, he sits up and presses his mouth to Eddie’s in a bruising kiss. “Of course I’ll fuck you, are you kidding me?” he gasps between kisses, “I can’t believe you wanna do that with me. I’ll make you feel so good, I promise.”  
Eddie laughs breathlessly, and the smile on his pretty red lips lingers as Richie tests his luck, and manhandles him around until his thighs are wrapped around his lower back. _Moment of truth_ , he thinks—Eddie as an automaton was heavier and stronger than him, even if his frame was consistently smaller; and it still is, but now that he’s human…

Richie stands up with Eddie in his arms. He stumbles for a second, but after he redistributes the weight properly he’s steady on his feet.  
“Oh!” Eddie tightens his arms around Richie’s neck and goes extremely red in the face. “Oh, that’s—wow.”  
Richie wants to make a joke about tables being turned or poke fun at Eddie for enjoying being picked up and carried around like an actual doll, but he’s rendered speechless by the feeling of Eddie’s cock leaking precum, wet enough to drench Richie’s own shirt. 

He says nothing, because his mouth is suddenly sandpaper dry, but takes the few steps that separate them from the bed and throws Eddie on it instead of lowering him on the mattress like he intended to. He’s...testing a theory. The theory being that Eddie is bossy as hell in bed (apparently! Fuck, he’s _so hot_ ) like out of it, but likes being roughed up a bit. He’s spent so long believing himself fragile and easily broken—Richie wants him to know he’ll hold him as tight as Eddie asks, kid gloves firmly _off_.

“Fuck,” Eddie moans, and one of his hands shoots down to wrap around his hard, pink cock, like he can’t help it.  
Richie swallows audibly. “Yeah, God, we’re getting there,” he says, and drops to his knees to stick a hand under the bed. 

He has tried a few times before to—well, not _finger_ himself himself, like Eddie so eloquently put it, but to at least touch himself down there, and he figured out pretty fast that lotion just wouldn’t cut it. So he shoplifted some lube from Mr. Keenes’ pharmacy (don’t tell his mom. For multiple reasons.) It’s been more than a year since he used it, and it could very well be expired, but hidden between the mattress and the bed itself there still should be

“Vaseline!” He yanks a couple of times, and the small container falls in his hand. “And it looks alright. Thank fucking God.”  
As Richie’s still examining the product, which indeed seems as transparent and odorless as it should, he hears Eddie shuffle on the bed. He raises his eyes when Eddie swings his legs over the edge of the mattress and Richie, still kneeling like an idiot on the floor, finds himself between his splayed thighs.  
“What do we need that for?” Eddie asks. There’s fine hair dusting his shins—Richie wants to rub his face all over them. 

Later. For now, Richie splays his free hand over Eddie’s taut stomach, fingers wide to touch as much of his skin as possible, and pushes him on his back.  
Eddie goes with no complaints, just an elated giggle that punches Richie right in the sternum. He lets his hand trail down Eddie’s body, brush against his waist and on his thigh until he can wrap it around his ankle. He puts the tub of Vaseline down on the floor, and mimics the hold on Eddie’s other ankle.  
“For this,” he says, and pushes his legs up as far as he can.  
“Jesus, fucking finally,” Eddie breathes out, bends his knees out of Richie’s grasp, lets his thighs fall on his chest. Richie wants to make a jab about Eddie being much bendier than a Ken doll, but his mouth dries up at how exposed Eddie is like this, bent in half like it’s nothing under Richie’s gaze and hands. He can see his hole, and his balls drawn tight under his heavy erection, laying on his stomach, red and waiting—and really, Richie’s never thought about _this_ in much detail, he just had the vague notion that a body hot and tight around his dick would feel _heavenly_ , and he wanted to find out just how much. He wasn’t prepared for what the sight of Eddie in his new, anatomically correct body would do to him. 

His entire arms go once again shaky and useless, like being this turned on is burning through all his reserves of energy—he feels weak in his limbs, and he doesn’t exactly _hate_ the feeling.  
Eddie raises on his elbows to look down at him, a smile still grazing his flushed face, and he keeps his legs bent and splayed wide— _he should have kept the knee-high socks on_ , Richie thinks suddenly, and he hears in his head the _ping!_ of unlocking a new level at an Arcade game. _Congratulations! You achieved a new life-long fetish!_

“Richie,” Eddie says, faux sweetly, “if you don’t do something I’m gonna start crying.”  
“Noooo,” Richie wines and quickly dips three of his fingers in the lube. He scoops up a generous amount, and rises to his feet to plant one knee of the bed. “Don’t cry, honey,” he says and leans down to simultaneously kiss Eddie’s smiling mouth and touch his fingers to his hole. 

The skin there is so hot and smooth. They both gasp against each other’s mouth at the same time—Richie overcome by the burning need to push his fingers in, chase the warmth as far inside as he can; Eddie because, apparently, he _really fucking likes_ being touched there.  
Richie circles his middle finger around the puckered skin. Eddie’s elbows slip from under him and he collapses back on the bed. “That’s so— _ah!_ —oh, that’s so good, Rich.”  
“Really?” Richie can’t believe his luck. “Great, cause I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”  
Eddie wraps his hands under his thighs and hikes them further up his body. And it’s _so hot_ , how obviously _into it_ he is, and Richie’s barely doing anything.  
“You want more?” he asks, daring to push the tip of his finger more insistently on Eddie’s hole.  
Eddie moans, all breathy and desperate. “Yes, yes, fuck, want you inside, come on,” and he moves one foot so he can push on Richie’s hand, and something about it melts what was left of Richie’s restrain. Not that he had any intention of stopping before fingering Eddie within an inch of his life, anyway, so slowly, carefully, he sinks his middle finger in. The ring of muscles gives in with some insistence, and then it’s easy, aided by the lube, to push further in Eddie’s willing body. 

“Oh no,” Richie moans brokenly, as Eddie arches his back and sucks in a breath, “this is a tragedy. I’m gonna last like two seconds when I get inside you.”  
“Mh mh,” Eddie hums, clearly not listening to a single word coming out of Richie’s mouth. His eyes are closed, brows furrowed, and he’s stroking his cock in time with Richie’s shallow thrusts. “ _Tragedy_. Faster, Rich. And come _here_.”  
“Uh?” He can’t be expected to multitask at the moment: he either fucks Eddie faster like he asked, eyes glued to how his finger disappears inside the tight heat, or he processes the English language.  
“Come here, closer,” Eddie adds with an annoyed huff, effect ruined by the rocking of his hips up to fuck his own fist and down to meet Richie’s hand. 

☆☆☆ 

Eddie hooks two fingers in the waistband of Richie’s boxers and tugs him to kneel on the bed properly.

The sensation of being filled with something, prodded and stretched and pinned into place is deliciously new—overwhelming. Richie’s fist is so tight around his erection, and that too is a wave of pleasure Eddie didn’t think possible. Sinking over and over in Richie’s hot mouth was something else entirely; not _worse,_ God, _no_ , his tongue lovingly curled around the head of Eddie’s cock was enough to wipe away all the bullshit they had to go through to get here—but the circle of his fingers, slicked up with the Vaseline and whatever keeps leaking out of Eddie’s dick (Richie hasn’t commented on it, so Eddie figures this is par for the course), is a pleasure that taps into something deeper. Eddie’s flesh and bone, now; his body seems to seek release even as it fires up with Richie’s touches, begging him to never stop. 

When he...came, earlier (he’s still getting used to the terminology. For all the swear words Richie taught him he never thought of adding more useful stuff to the curriculum), it was like a consuming tension that snapped all at once—for a moment, curved on Richie’s kneeling form, he was convinced it would hurt. The very first pain of his new human life, he thought, but he wouldn’t have minded if the reward was Richie’s dazed, happy smile, framed by copious tears streaming down his face. 

Oh, but it didn’t hurt. It felt so fucking _good_. Again, again, Eddie wants it _again_. 

He raises up on one elbow, barely any strength at all, and grips Richie’s wrist to make him add another finger, to go faster, something, _anything_.  
“Jesus, Eds,” Richie says, sounding as winded as Eddie feels, “why the fuck are you so slutty?”  
Eddie moans when the fingers inside him brush against a spot that feels particularly earth-shatteringly good. “Big words from the guy who shoved—oh my God, _fuck_ —shoved my whole dick down his throat as soon as I had one.”  
“‘T was not that difficult. It’s pretty small.”  
Eddie slaps him hard on the thigh, and hisses when Richie squeezes the base of his erection in retaliation. “I don’t fucking believe you! I bet it’s perfectly average!”  
Richie snorts, takes his hand away from Eddie’s cock so he can lean down and kiss him sloppily, still laughing. “I’m just fucking with you. It’s proportionate, you just happen to have a t _eeeee_ ny tiny body,” he says, with Eddie biting on his bottom lip to stifle his moans. “I could fit you in my pocket like a small, angry kitten.”

“I liked you better when you kept your mouth busy.” Eddie drags his hands down Richie’s torso, feels the wiry muscles contract under the thin fabric of his shirt, and slips one inside his boxers. He rubs his palm on the head of Richie’s dick, the fabric of his underwear sticking to his skin where he left a wet spot—he doesn’t seem to be as wet as Eddie, and he’s worried for a moment that the friction with his dry hand will hurt him, but Richie simply goes slack-jawed and wide-eyed at the first contact.  
“Relax, Eds,” he struggles to say, stretching Eddie’s nickname in a long and throaty vowel when Eddie curls his hand around the length of his cock. “I was just—Jesus, _slow down_ , I’m already so close—I was just introducing you to a long-standing human tradition.”  
Eddie rolls his hips down on Richie’s hand, his fingers still buried deep inside, but unmoving. The pressure on the whatever-that-spot-is is a sweet torture. “And what tradition would that be?”  
Richie grins but it’s all crooked and overwhelmed; his still damp hair is stuck to his forehead in sweaty curls. “Arguing about whose dick is longer.”

“Yours,” Eddie says, “congratulations, you win. Now put it inside me.”  
He uses his free hand to tug down Richie’s boxers, and Richie seems to take five seconds to process Eddie’s words before he’s joining in the effort. “Yeah, yeah, let’s do that,” he mumbles, almost face planting on the bed when he tries to wiggle out of both legs at once.  
Eddie laughs at him, but hisses when Richie’s fingers slip out of him too fast, and he’s prevented from complaining by Richie’s tongue in his mouth—which, _rude_ , but he will allow it this time.  
Finally, Richie lays on him between his spread legs. The intimacy of having their naked stomachs pressed together makes Eddie gasp through a wave of something he doesn’t have a name for. He can’t get over how deeply _physical_ emotions are now. 

“Eds,” Richie whispers against his lips, like it’s being punched out of him. “I’m so, _so_ happy I got you back.”  
Eddie arches under him, shifts so their erections slide together between their bodies. “Me, too, so much,” he moans, the edge of desperation creeping back in. Everything is a need—need to to keep Richie close, need to feel him long and hard inside him, need to be _touched_. “I...I don’t know where I was, where I went after It hurt me—maybe I just stopped existing, but I missed you. I still loved you.”  
Richie hide his face in the crook of Eddie’s neck and sniffles. “Oh, God. Love you too. Also I just remembered I don’t have any fucking condoms, that’s totally why I’m crying right now.”  
“The fuck is a _condom_?”  
“It’s a—a thing you put on your dick, so you can have safe sex!” he explains, raising his head. He apparently doesn’t realize he’s rolling his hips on Eddie’s, but Eddie is a second away from coming again, and he swears to the god that brought him back to life, he’ll do it with Richie buried to the hilt inside him.  
“We’re safe,” he argues, waving a hand at the locked door of Richie’s room,“ _and_ we’re having sex! What do we need a condom for?”

Richie blinks at him. “God, you’re a genius,” he says, and leans back on his haunches to wrap both hands under Eddie’s thighs, pushing them towards his torso like Eddie himself did a few minutes ago. “A genius, and _so_ bendy, too. My perfect, cute, literal _sex doll_.”  
“Oh, you’re gonna pay for that joke later,” Eddie promises, and it doesn’t come out as threatening as he wanted on account of the fact that his dick gets impossibly harder at the notion of Richie calling him _his._  
“I can’t wait,” Richie rebuts, and, with his big hands still folding him in half on the mattress, he lines up and pushes in. 

The brief flair of pain makes Eddie tense up, and Richie moans so loud it’s truly a miracle his parents aren’t home to hear him. “ _Don’t! Do that!_ ”  
Eddie sinks a hand in his own hair, tugging at the roots to distract himself from the feeling of Richie’s cockhead stretching him wider than his three fingers could. “Sorry! Try having a smaller dick next time!”, he says, but doesn’t mean it—he knows this can feel _great_ , they need to figure out how to make it happen.  
“Stop saying my dick is big, I’m _trying_ to last more than five seconds here.”  
“Okay, okay, yeah,” Eddie breathes out, relaxing his muscles. “Feels better now. Your big, fat cock forcing me open.”  
“ _Eddie! No!_ ”  
Eddie laughs, breathless, and bites his lip when Richie starts moving again. The sting of pain is still undeniably there, but it’s overshadowed by everything else firing through his veins; the pleasure of being bent and exposed and _naked_ in _his_ new body, under _his_ Richie—and when Richie lays back on him to gently kiss his cheek, his stomach rubbing on Eddie’s throbbing erection at every minute shift, the pain is not even a blip on his radar.  
“I’m very close, too, Rich,” Eddie reassures him. Richie’s panting breaths on his neck send violent shivers down his back. “Just go—faster. Stay like this and go faster.”

Richie for once doesn’t have anything to add, just nods and follows Eddie’s instructions. He bottoms out in one roll of his hips, and pulls out while Eddie is still gasping and adjusting to the size of him. Within seconds he’s fucking into Eddie again, and again, Eddie calves shaking on his shoulders, his arms cradling him close. Richie doesn’t hit that spot inside him again, but it’s okay, it’s more than okay, the tight channel created by their bodies around Eddie’s cock is enough to make his eyes roll back. He tries to kiss Richie’s red-bitten lips but ends up just gasping _ah, ah, ah!_ there at every thrust.  
Trapped under Richie’s bigger frame, his toes curling in the air, Eddie can’t move or brace himself or rock back his hips like he wants to, and the realization of that is enough to snap the tension, and he comes again, hard enough he’s sure his body is having some sort of malfunction. 

He goes slack in Richie’s arms. He suspects he goes unconscious for a few moments. “Did you—?” Richie asks, shock painting itself on his sweaty, flushed face, and the question dies out in a choked-off moan. He pushes as deep as Eddie’s body will allow, goes very still—his glasses slip off his nose to fall on Eddie’s heaving chest, but he doesn’t seem to notice. 

Eddie watches him in rapt fascination. The manic energy he felt earlier, like a wound-up toy who suddenly got shot through with electricity, has left him, and he can only stare, blissed-out, and the roughly fifty expressions that cross Richie’s face as he (carefully, this time) pulls out and collapses on the bed next to him. 

“So,” Eddie says when his brain decides to cooperate, “that’s what sex feels like?”  
“Apparently.” Richie’s open mouth is at high risk of forming a pool of drool on his pillow.  
“And people, like. Function in society.”  
“Yeah.”  
“They have jobs, and they go places—”  
“Yeah.”  
“And they _don’t_ do this all day every day.”  
“Dude!” Richie laughs, both hands in his hair. “I don’t get it either! What the fuck, man, I already want to go again. This is insane, it’ll ruin my life.”

“It was so good,” Eddie sighs again, but the moment of bliss (“They call it _afterglow_ ”, Richie will tell him later) is ruined by the sensation of Richie’s come leaking out of him.  
He groans his disgust and elbows Richie’s in the stomach when he tries to take a look instead of offering him something to clean up. Eventually he relents, and lets Richie spread his legs and watch the mess he’s made of Eddie for a full thirty seconds, in which Eddie has the pleasure of seeing his face go from normal, if a little flushed, to the brightest of tomato reds.  
After _way_ too long, he looks up at Eddie and informs him, “I can absolutely go again, by the way. Like, right now. Immediately.”  
Eddie considers the idea for a few moments, but finds himself completely wiped out—and unless Richie doesn’t mind having him fall asleep in the middle of it (which maybe he wouldn’t), he’ll need at least half an hour to recharge. 

He tells him as much, and then dozes off as Richie makes a trip to the bathroom and comes back in a new pair of boxers and with a warm wet towel for Eddie. 

It seems like the day—almost night, now; the sun dips to shine, red and golden, through the window of Richie’s room, and lower still until it disappears behind the rooftops of the neighboring houses—will end in well-earned relaxation. The minutes go by slow as molasses; they slip clean clothes on as calm and unhurried as they were desperate to push them off earlier. 

And then Eddie hears a car pull up in the driveway.

Richie immediately stops nuzzling the hollow in Eddie’s throat and springs up on the bed like he got electrocuted.  
“Shit!” he whispers, and it comes as loud as his normal voice, “My parents!”  
Eddie dives off the bed out of habit more than any real panic. “Fuck, I forgot they existed!”  
Richie makes a vague sound of agreement. “I mean, I thought it was weird that they weren’t home, but then you put your tongue in my mouth and I stopped caring.”

“Richie?” a voice calls from downstairs, followed closely by the front door shutting, and, unfortunately, the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.  
“Yeah, hi, Mom!” Richie yells, hands trying to smooth down the absolute mess of his hair, and then, to Eddie: “Put some real pants on!”

And Eddie manages, without tripping even once!, to not only slip on a pair of Richie’s jeans, but also cuffs the legs so it doesn’t look like he’s drowning in them. By the time Richie’s mom gently knocks on the door and peeks her head in, Richie is his usual badly-dressed self, and Eddie at the very least doesn't look like he was getting fucked into the mattress roughly one hour ago.

“Rich, did you hear what happened in Ne—Oh, hello!”

Richie makes a strangled sound next to him. Eddie forces his face to remain a pleasant shade of neutral when he says, “Hello, Mrs. Tozier. Nice, to, uh. Meet you?”

He can practically feel the waves of confusion radiating from Richie—he knows that if he sneaked a glance at him he’d see him be all bug-eyed behind the magnifying lenses of his glasses.  
“Mo—Maggi— _Mom_. What’s up? This is my...” Richie waves a hand in his general direction. Eddie tries very hard to telepathically express just how fucking weird he’s being right now. “My friend Eddie.”  
Maggie tilts her head, her styled curls bouncing neatly on her shoulder. “Yes, baby,” she says, sounding like she’s trying to decipher whether or not her son is building up to a joke. “I know. I’m bad with names but not _so_ bad.”

 _She’s acting like she’s known me for a while_ , Eddie realizes, and very casually sits back down on the bed, mostly to hide the suspicious stains on the duvet. Oh, God, that’s _so_ gross, how are they gonna clean _that_? 

Richie huffs an incredulous laugh, and slaps both hands to his thighs. “Of course you remember his name, _duh!_ Why wouldn’t you?”  
That earns an unimpressed look from Maggie, and barely suppressed snickering form Eddie. “You’re being so much weirder than usual,” she comments, and then turns to Eddie with an amused smile. “Anyway, I just wanted to let you boys know that a house collapsed in Neibolt Street, so _please_ don’t go there looking for trouble, alright?”  
“That’s so—crazy, damn, we didn’t even...hear anything, or—”  
“Like a whole house? An entire house? _Wow_.”

They both awkwardly trade off, Maggie’s eyebrows now up to her hairline. “If you had anything to do with the destruction of a building, I don’t want to know about it, because then I’ll have to call the police.” There’s a glint of humour in the stern look she shoots their way. “Oh, also, Eddie! I have some news: Mr. Keene said you can start working at the pharmacy next Monday.”

Eddie doesn’t know who Mr. Keene is, or why he would want to hire Eddie for a job he’s surely not qualified for, but Eddie has given up on analyzing Maturin’s influence on his life, so he goes along with it. Also, Richie’ll be so annoyed if he navigates the situation better than him, so take _that_ , self-proclaimed _Improv Master_. “That’s great, Mrs. Tozier! Thank you.”

Maggie takes a few steps in the room, her pastel blue pants swishings around her knees, and puts a comforting hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “No need to thank me. I’m just happy to help you get back on your feet. If I’d known what kind of person Sonia was…” She trails off with a pained sigh. “I wish I had got you out of that house sooner. You’ll always be welcome on this side of the family, Eddie.”  
There’s a background story here Eddie is wholly unfamiliar with, but he sees the open expression in Maggie’s eyes—so much like Richie’s, dark and kind, and the more Eddie looks at her the more of him he sees in the features of her face—and feels touched by the love and support, even if it’s all make believe. “I know, Mrs. Tozier. I appreciate it.”

Maggie smiles and brushes a curl off of his forehead. “You’re welcome. And stop being so formal, for fuck’s sake, call me Maggie.”  
Eddie’s startled into a laugh by the swearing and Richie, who apparently snapped out of his state of surprise, shrieks a scandalized, _Moooom!_ _  
_“Oh, shut it, as if you don’t swear like a sailor,” Maggie says with an eye roll, but her smile is still lingering on her lips. “Alright, I’ll leave you boys. There are some snacks in the kitchen if you haven’t had dinner yet.”

And with that, she leaves the room. There are a few seconds of stunned silence, the sound of her heels going down the stairs the only clear noise—then Eddie looks at Richie, finds him already staring back with an open-mouthed, incredulous grin, and they both break into laughter.  
“Dude!” Richie wheezes as Eddie plants his face in a pillow, “Did Maturin make you my _cousin?_ ”  
He yells in the pillow and comes back for air. “I don’t know? I fucking hope _not_?”  
“He totally did! Oh my God—”  
“Maybe like, a distant cousin?”  
“—I lost my virginity to my _cousin_ —”  
“Your mom said, ‘Welcome to this side of the family’, that implies, like. That we’re distant. Very distant cousins. I can’t even see which branch of the family tree you’re on, we’re so distant.”

Richie collapses on the bed next to him, still laughing. “Eddie, you have like one gallon of my blood running through your veins. Forget cousins, you’re my _son_.”  
“That’s fucking disgusting, Rich,” Eddie groans, and rolls on top of him. He dips down and kisses the grin right off Richie’s face. “Is that how you talk to your beloved cousin?” Another kiss; their lips part with a perfect smack sound, and Richie immediately pushes up for another. “We can _never_ touch again.”  
Richie hums his agreement and ruins it three seconds later by smacking Eddie’s ass—which, _still sore by the way_ , he _so_ does _not_ appreciate the move. 

Eddie bites his nose in retaliation and slides off of him and back on the mattress as soon as Richie’s hands snap up to cover the offended area. “ _Gremlin_ ,” Richie accuses him, voice all nasally, and Eddie just smirks at him.  
“So, to recap,” he says, starting to count the information he has on his fingers, “I’m officially eighteen years old, I graduated from a high school in, what was it, Bangor?, and we’re apparently related. Also, I have four days to figure out what a job at a pharmacy consists of, _and_ your mom absolutely adores me.”  
“Sounds about right,” Richie says, still caught in brief bouts of laughter. 

Eddie catches one of Richie’s hands in his own and entwines the fingers. He watches as if it’s the first time Richie’s chipped nail polish, the fine hair on his knuckles, the white lines of the tendons shifting underneath the skin when Richie squeezes back. He watches his own fingers and the imperfect, human shape of them, irreplaceable now, harder to fix, so much better at their job when their job is to feel and hold and touch. 

He realizes that now he’ll get to see them change—he knew already; the objective part of his brain which observes and stores information simply made account of it when he first opened his eyes (the second time around) and found himself as human as he’d ever hoped he would become. But now, the thought of it, it hits him all at once: how he’ll bear the signs of life on his skin, in his bones, in the lines of his face and length of his hair and the palm of the hand pressed to Richie’s own, a kiss that still lets them talk. 

He’ll grow old. He’s a boy, and he’ll be a man, and he can travel the distance between one and the other with Richie there to hold him close through it, as he did that terribly hot day in July when Eddie took his very first steps. 

“And we have a magical turtle to thank for it,” Eddie finishes.  
Richie smiles so bright it’s blinding, too tender to witness, so Eddie closes his eyes and holds his hand tighter. He shivers when Richie scoots closer, repeats, “Thank you, magical turtle,” a whisper away from his lips, and kisses him slow and unhurried, like they have decades stretching at their feet to do this and so much more—which, he guesses, they do.

Eddie smiles into the kiss. Finally, they do. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all she wrote.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who stuck around since chapter one, thank you to those who joined in halfway through, thank you to every single reader who gave this fic and its very weird premise a chance.  
> And most of all, thank you to [rea_of_sunshine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rea_of_sunshine/pseuds/rea_of_sunshine); I never, ever could have done it without you. You guys should go check out her [latest fic](24143125) if you're in the mood for teen!Reddie and a delicious slow burn. 
> 
> I can't believe it's over! Please let me know what you thought of this last chapter, and I sincerely hope the smut was worth all the wait (I personally had a lot of fun writing it).  
> I have many more Reddie fisc in the works, because something possessed me to sign up for three separate fic exchanges due in September lmao  
> Thank you again everyone, the support I got for this fic was insane and very unexpected <3 See you in the not so distant future!

**Author's Note:**

> Come scream at me about Reddie on Tumblr, I'm @[mere-mortifer](https://mere-mortifer.tumblr.com/)


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